The snails all play when it rains.

It rained too much recently. Our poor tent was a waterbed for most of the morning and a leaky one at that. This is only the most recent water trouble we've had to face. We were baptised by rain water in damp Amsterdam. The rain flap that covers the our tent was never waterproofed properly, so on through two rainy A'dam nights Sean had some Water Tortue going on all night long. In Rotterdam we faced our first European thunderstorm, and that's when we made the brilliant decision to duct tape our tent. We used a roll and a half of duct tape, covering all the seams on the rain flap so it looked like silver lightning was streaking down the ceiling of our tent. We did this in Antwerp, and by the time we set up our tent again in Bruges one of the tape streams was limply hanging from the rain flap. We shrugged it off. Bruges was pretty dry considering it's the rainy season and the city is right by the coast. A different, more severe tent problem was pitched in Bruges though. One of our tent poles broke. This happened just as we were packing our tent in the morning, about six hours before we needed to catch a bus in Brussels. This ain't no thang to Sean and I, of course, because we're the roughest and the toughest in Europe. We're also the luckiest. Our campground was only 400 meters away from an adventure/outdoor store. We made clear the path straight to this store, hustling in the roughest and toughest way. We found some tent poles with the help of a bespectacled clerk who could only speak a little bit of English, which she told us when we were explaining our situation with far too many words than was necessary. The poles cost 10 euros each, so we bought two, a much cheaper option than buying a new tent, which rang up at 75 euros.
The next time we successfully put up our tent was three days later and five hundred miles or so later in Beaune, where we had our second thunderstorm in Europe. In those three days we probably gained 30 rough and tough levels though, since we slept in two strange places and carried our heavy packs on our back for much too long. That's for another blog though. What I really meant to say in this blog is that there are many snails in Beaune, and they all come out after it rains. We counted at least ten or so, some curled up in their shells, other poking around slowly. I've never seen live snails before. They were new and beautiful.