A Sturdy Eureka Camping Tent
Saves the Day!

My Eureka camping tent got me out of a sticky wildlife situation the last time I went camping. I sure am glad I bought it instead of a cheaper, crummier brand of camping tent.

A few years ago, my boyfriend and I drove my Volvo up to Wisconsin one fair summer's day to spend the weekend swimming, lounging, hiking, exploring, and climbing rocks at a state park. We brought most of our food with us--sandwich supplies, cereal, tofu hot dogs, trail mix, etc.--so that we could cook and eat by a fire. We spent the day walking around the grounds and flopping around in the sunshine. It was nice.

After eating a dinner of makeshift tacos the first night, we cleaned up from our meal and went to head into our snazzy Eureka camping tent. After we'd been in the tent for a while, a raccoon crept sneakily onto our campsite. The little bandit found a loaf of wheat bread we'd left on the table after we ate and ran off into the night as we shouted at it and shook our fists. We came out of the tent to survey the damage and found that there were cute little footprints in the ashes of the fire where the raccoon had retrieved a tofu dog that had fallen off of my roasting stick a couple of hours before.

Raccoons are very clean and resourceful creatures: I expect he took the dusty dog and rinsed it in the spigot a few campsites down before he ate it. I bet a raccoon would make a good roommate. if you could convince him or her not to steal your bread.

Speculating about that, we made sure all the other food was safe in the cooler and went back to bed. Soon, the raccoon came back with an accomplice. Together the raccoons figured out how to open our cooler, stole a cherry juice box apiece, and booked it back into the woods before we could throw a stick at them.

At this point, we retrieved our cooler and took it into the Eureka tent. As we were staying in a two-person tent, it was now quite cozy in there with the cooler. We thought we surely must have defeated the raccoons after all of our efforts.

But we had not defeated them. In maybe forty-five minutes or so the raccoons had worked up the courage to approach us inside our Eureka camping tent. The lead raccoon approached first, making eye contact with me as it crept closer to us in search of our snacking supplies.

He took a minute to find the zipper to the tent. He wrapped his tiny human-looking hands around it and pulled, but to no avail. He tried again and found that the zipper would not budge for him. His raccoon friend soon came closer to pull with him, and though I was impressed by their efforts the zipper stayed put.

I didn't know this at the time I bought the tent, but it turned out that every Eureka tent comes with built-in raccoon-proof zippers. My tent saved our dinner and possibly our lives if that raccoon had had rabies or something. That's the kind of quality and care you get in a Eureka Camping Tent!