camping out

I love love LOVE camping. The dirt under my fingernails is gross, my hair gets frizzy, and I reek of wood smoke, but there’s something entirely marvelous about being out in the middle of nowhere with no electricity, toilets, and other modern conveniences! With the treetop canopy as our ceiling, the bark of maples and Scotch pine as our walls, and the colorful fallen leaves a fine carpet, it was a house I didn’t want to leave. Although it did seem a bit cold.

We drove into the park as we noticed patches of snow on the ground and freezing rain falling on the van. The hubs, always ever proficient at fire building, set up a tarp to give us a dry place to sit, and got a fire going. He then proceeded to put up our rather large tent with WAY too many poles in the dark. My hero. After roasting some hotdogs, we all crawled into our super huge sleeping bag and stayed pretty warm through the night.

The next morning found the sun poking through the clouds as we all sipped hot cider and hungrily downed eggs and hashbrowns. Camping food tastes so good—there’s just something about all that fresh air that gives one a ravenous appetite. (For the record we had tomato soup and grilled cheese for lunch, lemon-pepper chicken and broccoli for dinner, and pancakes and apple sausage for breakfast the next day. Not to forget the marshmallows! Magnus was enthralled with roasting burning his first marshmallows.) Gosh, I love to eat when I’m camping. Well, anytime actually.

Anyways, we got in three literally awesome hikes around the gorge. The last time we had really done any hiking around there was five years ago. This trip we had two little guys along with us. Magnus did 99% of the walking by himself, but Gunnar’s toddler attention span and lack of stamina left him strapped onto one of our backs. Not to mention, there were some HUGE dropoffs that he could have gone tumbling down.

I took a pile of pictures, but unfortunately the image quality settings got changed on my camera, so they’re not the best. But they’ll do in a pinch… At least you can see how much fun we had over the weekend. I think our boys love camping as much as we do.