FIRE ENVY!

We arrived back to camp after the laser show and decided to have a nice camp fire.

As Cari was getting Randy and Meredith ready for bed, we could hear bagpipes playing not far from our own site. The Scottish Highland Games were at the park the same weekend, and many of the Scots were staying in the same campground.

My fire was rough getting started, but after a few fist fulls of newspaper to get it going, I felt like it was burning well. I threw some larger pieces of wood on top.

With the kids in the tent, Cari and I sat near the fire. We watched and waited for the actual fire to start. The wood was slowly burning, but there wasn't much in the way of flames. I stooped over to rearrange the fire. When I looked up, Cari was staring at the Scots. "What's going on over there?", I asked her.

"They have a huge fire over there", she replied. I looked toward the five foot flames. What I saw was six bagpipe players and about a dozen people dancing, all illuminated by huge flames.

Cari talked about becoming Scottish for the night and joining them. I looked back at my own campfire that was putting out nothing but black smoke. That's when fire envy set in. The next forty minutes were spent trying to get my fire going. Cari told me if she went over that she would bring me back a burning log to get our fire going.

Once the bagpipes stopped, Cari announced she was going to bed. My fire was a failure. I stayed up another twenty minutes staring into the darkness. Where did I go wrong? Will a handful of men wearing skirts (kilts) out do me? Having already surrendered to them on my bagpipe skills, I would need to beat them on fire building.

We were going to be camping one more night, so I had one more chance to prove my ability at fire building. "Tomorrow night the Scots will have envy over MY fire", I thought as I crawled into the tent.The next night the Scots were back out in full force. This time my fire was bigger and hotter. In fact it was almost too big, and too hot. I didn't tell Cari, but I was kinda hoping the Scots would come over with their bagpipes and dance around our fire. After the last log burned, we realized how cold it really was outside and went to bed. That night, Cari didn't mention going to be a Scot a single time.