What did you do this Labor Day weekend? We went camping.

It was just for one night up in Winchendon, Mass., on Lake Dennison. I haven’t been camping since I was a kid, so I was more than a little out of practice. Also? We were underprepared for the intense overnight cold and the air mattress that we had packed had a major leak — so major that it was completely flat by the time we were done roasting marshmallows and playing travel scrabble in front of the fire. We went inside the tent anyway to sleep (after all, we had gone through all that trouble to pitch the tent). We didn’t have enough blankets and the ground was hard. We tossed, turned, whined. Around what we suspect was before 5 a.m. (neither of us really wanted to know what time it was but the moon was bright and the sky was light), we moved into the car and spent the next three hours of sporadic sleep in there.

Well, better luck next year.