My marriage is being strained and not just by the sheer number of children and animals at my house.

No, any marriage will be tested if one spouse likes to camp and the other would have the majority of his or her teeth pulled rather than sleep in a tent. I put the wedding vows -- those little ones about sticking together through better or worse, through sickness and health, through camping and not camping -- to the test during a recent camping trip.

While my husband and I agree on nearly everything, camping is not one of those. Departure for our first night in the tent was delayed by two hours because of a debate over sleeping conditions. Because we were leaving for the campsite late in the evening, my husband noted that a nice comfortable, already-made bed was waiting for us in the bedroom. We should leave for camping in the morning, shorting our trip by one night.

I rationed that the tent was already erected (and repaired, as noted later), that I had gone to a lot of work to prepare the campsite, that I was sleeping in that tent all of the allotted night even if we arrived at 3 a.m.

I won't say here who won that discussion, but let's just say we were fixing eggs the next morning with the cool breeze of the lake blowing on our faces.

But I shouldn't gloat too much because despite all that I have learned about camping as I grew up, it's never too late to learn including sympathizing for my fellow camper usually referred to as my husband.

Lesson No. 1: Tents should not be erected until they are in use.

Trying to hold a space for the upcoming holiday weekend, my friend and I paid our fees and erected our tents on the spots we wanted to use for the next week.

Upon returning several days -- and several storm- filled nights later -- we found our tents in undesirable conditions.

My friend's tent had merely been flattened. All the poles had mysteriously come undone and were laying scattered across the campsite, but everything was located and intact.

On the other hand, my tent did not make it through unscathed. A fiberglass pole, previously thought indestructible, snapped in two, sending it through the rain flap. On the positive side, the flap featured three new air vents.

This is where we relearned Lesson No. 1.5: Duct-tape will fix anything. While my husband splurged on canvas tape for the rain flap, the pole was fixed using a half roll of duct-tape. While the tent was no longer completely esthetically pleasing, the pole held through three more wind-filled nights.

Talking to my sister-in-law, also an avid camper, a few days after finding the mangled tent, she sympathized, but noted that she just usually staked their tent to the ground, but left the stakes laying inside the flattened tent. Now she tells me.

Lesson No. 2: Avoid satellite dishes if at all possible.

Using what we know now, my friend and I would have looked for a campsite as far away from satellite dishes as physically possible.

When I mention satellite dishes, I'm not referring to the ones floating around in the sky. Instead, I'm talking about the satellite-cable dishes toted to camping grounds, usually by recreation vehicles better-equipped than my house.

While it's up for debate whether these RV'ers are really camping or are just residing in a mansion on wheels, these people are more than welcome to bring their cable TVs, DVD players, video games along for the trip. I just don't want to be around it because of the hassle it creates.

Remember that we are taking our kids out into the wilderness, trying to get them away from modern conveniences, out from in front of a video screen. We want them to learn how to build a fire, cast a fishing line, dust off the dirt from dropped food.

Yet after just a few hours at the campground, motivated children will have made friends with anyone in ownership of a working cable wire or TV/VCR combo.

My friend's daughter avoided her father upon his delayed arrival to the campground because she knew the wrath she would face when he found out she was watching a movie while camping.

Lesson No. 3: If you go camping with a bad back, you will return with a bad back.

Despite what the box for the air mattress says, inflatable cushions are never as comfortable as a real mattress. The first 15 minutes after waking from a night on the ground will be spent walking in a bent-over position, looking 30 years older than you really are.

I must give my husband some slack in this area because he does have a bad back. I'm asking a lot of him to sleep on the cold-hard ground with only a slowly-leaking air mattress between us and the twig-strewn earth below us.

And as anyone who has slept on an air-mattress with another person knows, the heavier person had it worse. The heavier person will sink to the ground while the lighter person floats upon the puffed-up section of the mattress.

Let's not even get into what happens when you throw five small children into the tent and they walk across the mattress in the middle of the night. Let's just assume all sleep is lost and it takes an extra 10 minutes to walk upright in the morning.

-- Ronda Graff doubts she'll go camping again this summer. Her marriage can only take so much strain.