There are only a handful of times during the year when I wish we ha a trailer...and Labor Day is one of them. We thought it'd be fun to go camping over Labor day weekend with Jared and Sarah. We originally planned on renting a little trailer, but the cost was outrageous for the short time we needed it, so we decided not to go at all. Then we were sad that we might be staying home Labor Day weekend, so we changed our minds an decided at the last minute to tough it out in a tent.
We had lots of campfires...
We pushed our trucks and tractors around the campsite, moved some pinecones around, dumped some dirt, went exploring, gathered lots of big sticks to poke the fire, jumped on some fallen trees...
Matt and J did most of the cooking. There's something about camping that makes men want to cook...
We went on a pretty long 4 wheeler ride. There were TONS of trails up there! Matt and J, of course, wanted to do the ones that were "extreme" and "most difficult." They were pretty fun. We had 3 on one 4 wheeler and 4 on another...it was a little crowded, and all of the kids fell asleep at different times during the ride.
We hung around the campsite a lot too. We ate, talked, poked at the fire, finger painted, played a game-yeah, just one, because of the fingerpainting mess. It was EVERYWHERE!
The kids LOVED it! They loved not having to shower, not having to fix their hair, not worrying about what to wear (Coop wore his PJ shirt all day one day). Chloe was kind of hot and cold about it. She'd have one little inconvenience, and start screaming about how this was the worst camping trip EVER, but the next minute she'd be running around and talking about how she wanted to stay all week-that's a girl for ya!! Port and Coop really loved the dirt, the runnin' around, and the John Deere boots, the hot dogs, and just everything about the whole experience. Port was sad when it was time to go home.
The whole experience for me was pretty ok. I didn't hate it as a lot of people (including me) expected. I've been camping a few times before. I couldn't keep my dad or our camping memories out of my head all weekend. We (my dad, my brother, and I) camped a lot when we were little. We camped in a tent (a little green one) on Lake Texoma on some pretty nice campgrounds. I remember bathrooms, and a water spicket at our campsite. We swam, cooked (I remember an old Coleman, green, fold-up stove, had a fire, and all that good stuff. We used to go up to my Grampa's cabin up North in Michigan a lot during the summer too. The cabin sort of had running water, it was a bathroom, and some water outside you had to pump to get it. We always went with our cousins, and it was SOO fun! We'd have so much fun just running around in the woods and walking up and down the sandy road. I saw a lot of that in my kids over the weekend. I went to girls camp every year of my teenage years, but we camped in air-conditioned cabins and had bathrooms and showers. I'm just not the roughin' it type. My kind of camping is an airconditioned cabin, or a big ol' trailer :) I did it, and it was kinda fun, and I'm glad I don't have to do it again for a long time :)
