I didn’t get a minute of sleep, not one. Even with the bare minimum of stuff I still had a huge load to carry – including a three year old and all our water – and there wasn’t room for a sleeping mat. So it was a long, hard night on the bare ground underneath a tarp flapping in very strong winds.
Once the kid was down, I lay there listening to the cacophony, counting down the moments until it rained, and waiting for dawn to break. She slept like a log under the faintly ridiculous shelter I built from a tarp, two tent pegs and her baby carrier. Not bad for her first ever bivvy.
Click through for a video and stills of our first Daddy-Daughter Bivvy.
It was June 2018, almost a year ago this weekend. The previous year, I’d taken our daughter on her first camping trip at the Great Wall. For that one, a tent was needed because I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t get up in the night and roam around, potentially falling over, or even off something. This time, at three and a half, she was better at sleeping through the night and I was a year more tired. I left the tent behind and brought a tarp to make a bivuoac.
 Great Wall with baby |
 Kungsleden |
 Great Wall with Two Year Old |
I’d actually planned to camp somewhere else, but when we got there, it didn’t feel right. On all those wild wall sites, you need to be comfortable, especially camping and especially with a child. Not physically, but mentally. So we retreated to the pass near Dayingpan, a place I know very well and knew we’d have no trouble. It was late in the day by the time we arrived, set up camp, gathered some twigs for the Fire Ant stove, and made dinner.
Overnight, it was frankly pretty uncomfortable, but kind of cool. I’d set up my tripod right outside the “door” of the shelter and I fooled around taking timelapses of the moon rising (there’s a brief one in the video above). I’d check on the kid from time to time, lying by my legs, snuffling happily in deep sleep.
During the very early morning, it drizzled a little but not enough to stop the kid playing happily and fooling about in the outdoors like all kids seem to love. I had fun just chatting to her and following along her elaborate cooking game – quite similar to what she got up to on the previous year’s trip.
We left camp when it was still very early. I had a change of clothes in the car for both of us, and we drove down the pass and along the side roads to an area near the ancient spur of Great Wall that runs off the main Ming wall between Shixiaguan and Badaling.
There, it was dumpling time, and we certainly indulged ourselves!
We even made it back to Beijing in time for the Peter and the Wolf concert. Snagged a park right out front, three minutes before it began.
The kid enjoyed the bivvying and loved the concert. Mission accomplished. I was WASTED. But it was the perfect Daddy Daughter weekend.
