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While the final bill has yet to be determined for our first family camping trip, I will start out by saying that despite getting off to a literal bang-up of a start, things did get better…eventually.
We decided to camp about 20 minutes away from our house ~ that way if we needed to make a trip home, it wasn’t a big ordeal. :) Lesson #1 that we learned:
Visit the campground ahead of time and check out the sites if possible.
There was a rather large and deep crevice right down the center of the site…meaning there would be a nice hole/ditch for someone to keep stepping in if the tent was set up over it. We decided to head back to the office and ask for another site.
That’s when we learned Lesson #2:
When you are camping in the woods, there are trees. A van with a bike rack on the back of it does not appreciate being backed up into a tree. The tree will always win.
On the bright side, it wasn’t me who wrecked the van. This time. On the down side, we hadn’t even set up the tent yet, so the frustration had pretty well peaked at this point. We soon discovered that not only did the van have a few issues, our {new} bike rack is going to require some major manipulation and both of the girls bikes need to be replaced {sigh}.
Eventually the big ol’ tent was up and sleeping bags were in place, and all without major problems. All of the tent pieces were present and accounted for and all was good!
The kids then enjoyed a little mini-golf {aka: to help soothe the girls with the unridable bikes}.
The boys thoroughly enjoyed helping build the fire. Keeping them away from it later proved to be difficult. Kaleb is going through a bit of a clumsy walking stage and I can’t tell you how many moments of panic I had when he would trip and fall right near the fire.
A mother’s heart can only take so much.
And of course there were s’mores. And marshmallows on fire…
And because I am a super-cool mom, I pulled out glow bracelets for the kids to enjoy {and for us to keep track of them}.
Which brings me to Lesson #3:
The connectors to the glow bracelets are MUCH easier to find during the light of day. It would be better to have them in a special place before dark hits…and all the connectors fall on the ground in the pitch black of night.
That night as we were all laying/lying/resting…whatever…in our beds and it was completely quiet both outside and in our tent, Zachary summed up the evening very well:
That campfire was awesome!!
Just makes me smile and want to go again.
Minus the tree incident, of course.
