When I was a kid, my family went camping every summer. When I was 12, my Dad ordered a new, much larger tent. Well, it didn’t arrive until the morning we were supposed to leave, so we threw it into the box trailer without ever even opening it to check the parts, stuck the car-top boat on top of the heavily-loaded trailer and loaded me, my sister, my friend Carol, Dad and Mom and the cat into the station wagon and off we went.
As we got close to the campground, in the late afternoon, one of the tires on the trailer blew out. We didn’t have a spare, and the jack in the car couldn’t lift the heavy trailer anyway. So Dad unhooked from the trailer, drove back down the road to the last gas station we’d passed, and left Mom, 3 kids and the cat in the coffee shop while he and the station owner drove to the nearest salvage yard, bought a used tire and rim of the right size, then drove to the trailer and jacked it up using the station’s portable jack and changed the tire.
While they were gone the rest of us had a meal and the station owner’s wife, who thought the cat was just wonderful, gave the cat lots of milk.
When Dad got back, he grabbed a sandwich and off we all went again. By the time we arrived at the campground, it was well after dark and the ranger was gone for the night. So we prowled the campground until we found a space that looked promising. Dad put up the old bell tent and put Mom and my sister (age 5) in it to blow up air mattresses while he and I and Carol put up the new tent. Our only light came from a couple of flashlights and the kerosene lantern. Remember - we’d never seen this tent before.
Somehow we got it up and my parents and sister slept in it overnight while Carol and I shared the old tent with the cat.
In the morning we discovered that we had pitched the new tent on the side of a hill and overnight the second room of it (intended to be an eating area) had collapsed, althought the sleeping area was OK. That day we moved to a flatter space. But in the meantime, the cat had gotten sick as a result of all that milk and for the next 3 days she had to spend her time outside the tents tied by a long leash to a tree in case she had an accident. Fortunately there were no bears or wolves or coyotes so she survived this experience.
Now it is 50 years later and my sister told me this summer that she still had that tent until about 10 years ago and sold it to somebody for $150 - which was probably more than Dad paid for it back then.