This story comes to us from Patti in Clarendon Hills, Ill.

Door County, Wisconsin is a beautiful place to visit with incredible weather during the month of August. Typically, we are a family who would stay in a local resort, say the Newport or the Highpoint Inn, but not this particular year. We decided that we would purchase a larger tent to house my husband, myself, and our 3 daughters, ages 1-1/2, 5-1/2, and 9-1/2.

It was quite the adventure. We drove from our house in Clarendon Hills, Illinois approximately 4-1/2 hours, okay let’s make that 5 hours with all of the bathroom breaks. Upon our arrival at Peninsula State Park, we were thinking of how lucky we were that the restrooms and showers were only 3 campsites away, especially when we would be venturing out in the wee hours of the night to pay our visit. So, we set up camp, went out for dinner, roasted smores over the open fire my husband so proudly built using his Boy Scout skills. It was a great first day and we were all pretty tired.

When we all finally passed out, about midnight by now, I woke up to a sound that almost sounded like animals laughing. In fact, I thought it sounded like monkeys due to the fact we saw a small furry animal hanging out on a branch in the tree earlier. It looked nocturnal, so I thought perhaps he was awake. No such luck. We were all awake by now when suddenly a family of raccoons was upon our tent scratching to get in. We screamed, we yelled, we turned on the flashlights, but much to our surprise one of the little buggers wedged his nail inside the zipper pull and managed to open the zipper by my 9-1/2 year old daughter’s head. We were able to scare them away for a few minutes with enough time to get the kids back to sleep.

There was no way I was going to fall back to sleep as I lay there awake shaking of fear that they would be returning. Within at least 15 minutes, they came down what we identified later as their natural predatory path only to haunt us again. The upside of this visit was that they just came to raid the campsite’s picnic table where we may have left a few scraps of smores along with some empty cans of pop or beer. They managed to climb inside of a box we had filled and had a field day tossing the cans out which had to have woken many other nearby campers.

To say the least, I did not sleep a wink as I stayed “on guard” in case of another attack. The next night was much more comfortable as we lay in the nice cozy beds of a hotel. I guess I wasn’t cut out to fight the wild in the middle of the night. All the same, it was one of the most memorable trips we have taken to Door County.

Thanks, Patti, for that story! Glad to see that you survived multiple visits from the family of raccoons.

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