We took our then-5-year-old daughter on her second backpacking trip, this time to the Mt Rogers national recreation area in Virginia. Those of you who hike out West are used to seeing semi-wild horses and cattle, but it's unusual in the East.

So anyway we're camping in our big 4-person Eureka dome tent -- all 13 pounds of it -- along the ridgeline of Pine Mountain, on the edge of a nice meadow off the trail. We wake up and it's pouring down rain. The we hear the bear -- sounds like a REALLY BIG bear -- snuffling around the outside of our tent, crunching away on, er, um, grass.

Okay, so bears don't eat grass. So I open the door of the tent to see the biggest cow I have ever seen staring back at me. She starts to push her way inside the tent, I guess to get out of the rain (that is now pouring into the tent through the open door.) I am pushing back as hard as I can. In the meadow there are a dozen more cows, all looking over at the great struggle to see who will win. I manage to push the cow's head aside and my lovely wife zips the door closed. Crisis averted. Cow goes back to eating grass in the rain.

That was also the trip where we learned to buy real rain gear, even for growing kids. But that's another story.