Of Food And Love: Family Camping Trip

How to write about this experience without thoroughly overloading you all on all the details that made it SO memorable.

We got up there around dinner time.  D started setting up the tents and pulled out the grill and stove.  I started dinner.  None too soon, because the thunder that had been quaking through the mountains, which we were hoping would pass around us, dumped buckets on our poor fuzzy heads.

We scrambled for cover, but not before our plates were a soppy mess.

Uhg. Slightly frustrating but now I understand why nearly everyone in the camp had tarps strung from tree to tree.  In the end, so did we…

After the downpour we went on a hike. The campsite is in the thick of the woods and they have wonderful trails all around.

The trail we chose was at the further most end of the site and it was a bit of a wonderland.  Moss, mushrooms, fallen trees, ferns, clearings full of light.  Beautiful.  I love moss.  It has this soft, fuzzy appearance and I just want to sit and roll around in it.  But I refrained and took pictures instead.

Cylas couldn’t contain himself.  He wanted to explore every path, every clearing, every little marsh.  He was a riot.

Later that evening, we sat around the fire, drank hot cocoa and made s’mores.

Now, it’s been about 5 years since we last camped, so I was a little rusty and forgot a few things.  *groan*  But luckily, we were only 25 minutes away from our house, so I was able to run back and pick up the few things I forgot…along with my mom’s help.  For some reason, my head wasn’t totally into this camping trip.  It proved to be one, big, fat “joke’s on you” type of experience.  After setting up our tents, eating, hiking, veggin’ we hunkered down for the night, only to find that our mattress had deflated.  So, we tried blowing it back up again…the batteries were almost dead in the pump so we switched out the ones in the flashlight.  Bed pumped back up, we tried it again and in three minutes we were getting swallowed by our rebellious mattress.   Whatever.  We would deal with it in the morning.

The next day, we walked around the campgrounds.  My children have hawk eyes when it comes to berries and they hit the mother load.  We were the only family foraging around in the bushes like bears, snagging every pretty little bright red jewel of a berry we could find.  Yummyy!

The berries were delicious and I think we cleared out three bushes between the four of us.  Cy was eager to go hiking again, so D took them and my mom on a cute little trail.
My little boy is so much fun.  He filled his backpack with snacks and provisions for their 15 minute hike, “just in case”.

While they hiked, I ran.  6 glorious mountain miles.  And on my run I passed them by the water’s edge fishing.   When they finished their hike, Cylas made sure they found their way to the water.
He caught about 7 little fish! (all catch and release).  And every time he caught one it was like the first time all over again.  He would yelp and start reeling it in, saying, “I caught one, I caught one, I caught one!”  So precious.  Never was there a bigger grin than the one on my baby boy’s face that day.

Now, Roma didn’t have any special requests or demands other than to go to the bathroom every 20-30 minutes.  So irritating.  But I suppose that’s MUCH better than her wetting her pants.  That evening, she and I were talking and I was complaining to her about how often she had to go potty, she turned to me and in her limited vocabulary said, “Mama, I go potty, and potty, and potty, and potty, and potty, and potty, every turnee minutes!”  Then she held up her little hands to show me what “turnee minutes” was…
I couldn’t stop laughing.

Of course, we ended our last full day there with showers, dinner, hot cocoa and s’mores.

Then, it was revenge of the rebellious inflatable refuse-to-stay-inflated mattress.  Never again.  I wanted to personally kill that stupid thing and only God knows how long I’ll be sore from the abuse.  Because, even after I ran back to the house, got our plug in pump, borrowed someone else’s electricity, pumped it up good, by the time David walked across the road and put it in our tent it was a sad, sagging story.  I’m going to stop writing about this now, my back doesn’t want to remember the horrors of a thousand little rocks and other pieces of hard nature sticking into it.

I love camping!

With a new mattress, I could camp anywhere….