well ok .. i operate a 2007 toyota Yaris hatchback. it’s like a little truck and i use it to haul everything.
i have been, of late, pondering the possible charms of lighting the area. at first i thought about strings of battery led lights. i have a couple of strings for the tent/hammock, but they really don’t put out much actual lumins. so then i mutated into thinking about coleman lamps and tiki torches, soon enough then that seemed like i’d be temping the open-fire nazies. so pooh pooh to that dramatic and excellent idea. then i became temporarily fixated on flashlights. i have half a dozen of little AAA battery cheapie ones, and can get more pretty much free from cabelas because they sell then in 6-packs. with batts too. now .. these things put out a goodly amount of light, but it’s in a beam, so it needs aimed, and sure as God made little green apples, it would not be aimed in the right spot of else be in somebody’s eyes. flashlights needed some form of deflector or diffuser. i tried several shapes of reflector and am not happy with them, so then i made a diffuser cone out of paper. at home i found very very thin and painfully retro thin paper from Japan. it made a warm and charm filled cone of cream colored light. i could see them hanging from a line, the swaying cones gently bathing the group area in asian paper serenity. i’d a done that too .. but they are extremely delicate, and so i started dorking around with cones made of silnylon. now THAT was more like it. i lost the meditative tranquility with it’s oriental paper lantern association, but still … it’s sil, and it’s a ggg. the issue came up that the silnylon cones wanted to collapse too soon in the taper, which i solved by incorporating an O’ring about half way up. now then, we had a pretty sweet light, and it could hang nicely from line or tree.
along about then, i got to thinking that i should really be earning a living, and had a thought of “it’s a shame there isn’t something already existing that makes light in a nice diffused way, and comes in colors, and can hang on a string, and can do this for a long evening, and won’t start a fire … ” oh ya ,, lightsticks. duhhh ..
deep research i can source cyalume sticks off of ebay. and i suspect that’s what i’m going to do. lightsticks. plenty, or few, as seems appropriate. colors too. they even have little ones, so we can toss a few out where the camp road spits off the main track for late arrivals.
that was my ponderings so far.
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