There are moments in my life when I become nostalgic. Those moments primarily appear when I rediscover a thing from my past that brings back memories.

Some of these moments appear when I visit my parents’ house where I lived for 20 years. Some of my things are still there and some are even in the same place I left them when I got married 6 years ago.

The last time I went on to search through things there was this week when I was searching for a sleeping bag after we took the tent from my parents.

We are planning to go camping in the tent for a few weekends when our schedule will allow it and my parents have a big 5 person tent. In its own history since we have that tent, it was only me that I’ve actually used it. 4 or 5 times when I went camping with a group of friends and one time when I went with my wife Catalina camping on a popular road in Romania, the Transfagarasan.

This tent surely brings back a lot of memories.

First camping trip with the tent was in 2009, in Chisindia, a village in my county. This was the first trip with my group of friends from church, though only the boys wanted to go this time, so it was a boys only camping trip.

Then in 2010 with the same group of friends from church, we went to Padis, a really nice location in Romania, located in Apuseni National Park. This time the girls decided to come too. The main memories I have here are two now that quickly come to my mind. First, my 17th birthday was here while camping and the girls made a cake from what materials we had available: cocoa, biscuits, and candies. Normally you don’t eat a cake with those ingredients, but it was very good considering that we did not eat something sweet for days in a row.

The second memory from this trip is that on an evening there a really heavy rain started out of nowhere while we were at our tents. Because my tent was the biggest one there every one of us gathered in my tent. Imagine 12 persons inside a 5 person tent. It was nice and we had activities to do while outside it was pouring down with heavy rain.

2011 time. This time we went to a really nice place in Romania with the same group of friends and the same tent: Cheile Nerei. This is a really nice camping place where you have plenty of activities to do. Oh, and plenty of water also. Sadly, I can’t find all the photos from this trip, all that I can find are the photos I’ve already shared here, I will keep looking for those pictures cause I hate not having all of them. One memory I have from this trip is the time a friend almost stepped on a poisonous snake (that area is known for having viper snakes). Then we tried to kill the snake so it won’t bite us and we thought we succeeded after we hit it with the leg of the kettle. But after a while, the snake recovered and ran away.

Our last camp/trip in this formula was in 2012 when we went to Stana de Vale. It was straight after I finished with my 12th-grade exams and before applying for college. After this trip, we started to be busier and unfortunately the trips stopped, but it was a great trip too in a really nice place. Sadly again not all photos from here were found for this post, will work more on finding those. So you’ll have to believe that I used the same tent. One memory I have from this trip is the time we tried to make a natural stove with mud and wood. We spent a lot of time carrying mud from the woods, then we made a structure for the stove and made a fire. Instead of drying, the mud fell down and our stove was broken. But hey, who spent 2 hours making it? We did!

After this trip, the tent stayed in the garage for 4 years. In the meantime, I got married to Catalina. After a little below 1 year of marriage, we went for a weekend with the same old tent in Transfagarasn, a nice road in our mountains. It was the first time Catalina slept in a tent, and by the way, she was pregnant. It was the 15th of August but we both remember it was one of the coldest nights we ever experienced. We had 2 or 3 layers of clothes on us and we were still shaking from the cold weather.

This was the last time the tent was used, in 2016. Since then it has stayed in my parent’s garage unused. So imagine the joy and memories I had when this week we took the tent again to our house and we’ve set it up to inspect it and see if it’s still good for new trips. The tent has a really nice quality, made by an American company so it’s still good. And while all those memories I wrote above came to my mind while I and my wife were installing it, I was thinking what a wonderful feeling to have both of my boys in the same tent I spent time as a teenager. For me, this is one of the weirdest but nicest feelings, not sure about you, but I really like these nostalgia moments I get.

Do you have that kind of moment, when you really want to look through old photos and live those memories again? Most of the time when I am this way, I share photos I find with my friends and we laugh about those times. It is really nice and I am really glad I kept ~500GB of old photos in my cloud, those will be pure gold when I will be much older than I am now.

And also hey… what a strong tent, isn’t it? 😂

Post edit: I wrote this post 7 hours ago, on July 17th. Now after 7 hours guess what I see on my iPhone? Exactly on 17th July I was on the first trip with this tent, the one I mentioned here too. Whaaat? Spooky!