Friday, September 16, 2011

Camping Part 3: Actually Camping

Let's see...in yesterday's driving saga, we had finally made it to the campground. I have to say that I wasn't sure what to expect. Of all the campgrounds along our lake shores, this one was the least booked for the weekend which made me a little bit nervous. After all, when I reserved our space, the campground was only 29% booked compared to 98% booked at all the other state parks.

Thankfully, I had nothing to fear. The campground was actually really nice. The staff were friendly, the spaces were nice and even the bathrooms were really well maintained. I wouldn't hesitate to camp there again, but the family voted and decided to try out a different state park each year. We're already planning on Wilderness State Park for next summer.

After checking in, we headed towards our campsite. It was only 2 spaces and across from the bathroom which was nice. I wanted something close to the beach path, close to the bathrooms and level. Our site met all of those! We got all pulled in and the next step? Setting up the tent....

This is the boys tent. I've set this one up a few times and can do it by myself in minutes so with some help, it went up really fast. This, however, is where we met up with our first "Things She Forgot To Pack" snafu. The ground here was really hard and silly me hadn't thought to get a rubber mallet for pounding in the stakes. What is he using, you might ask? Umm...a great big, giant plumber's wrench that was in the back of the van. Why? Because it belonged to my grandfather and when I took it from the house (I won't say how many years ago.) it somehow became housed in my van.

The other tent was a bit more complicated. It took Roger, Justin and myself to get it put together. It mostly took all 3 of us because we'd need 2 people to hold one section while the 3rd person moved another piece into place. I was so relieved when it was up and our campsite looked like this:

Our tents are all setup, our sleeping bags and clothes are all inside and we even got our chairs around the campfire site and our picnic table looking all snazzy. After that, we relaxed for a while before making our yummy dinner of hotdogs (grilled on sticks in the fire, of course), fruit, veggies, pasta salad and potato salad. My favorite part of the evening? Teaching the boys how to set fires...hehe....in a safe and sane manner, of course. Then, the boys wanting to sing campfire songs but only knowing this weird one from Spongebob.

For your viewing/listening pleasure, I include this video:

And as usual, once I embed a video, it no longer wants to allow me to set the alignment so I'll leave you with just one more picture...our very first campire....and a handsome boy enjoying it.