Camping

We had a great time camping at Knoll Lake again last week! The weather was perfect, nobody was sick, and nothing went wrong.

Had something gone wrong, we probably would've been okay, since there were about a hundred Boy Scouts sharing the campground with us! We though "oh great" when we realized it was a week-long multi-troop scout camp, but they were great kids & didn't bother us at all. We saw them passing off merit badges for boating, fishing, cutting wood, biking, and (gasp) we heard them shooting rifles. They were a busy bunch of kids.

We hiked a little more than we usually do. The kids are good little hikers and pull their own weight.

Rob didn't bring his remote control boat this year, so we did other stuff at the lake. He doesn't like to eat fish, and I have not desire to gut & clean them anyway, so we don't fish. But the kids really like watching the schools of baby fish, and we caught a few with an aquarium net so we could check them out for a while. I named the first one Steve, and then Erin named the rest.

Here are Steve, Bob, Newton, Jamie, and Claude (the crawdad).

When we set them free, I let the kids (and Rob) each hold one in their hand for a few seconds before tossing them back in the water.

I realy wanted to hike up to the beginning of the lake and see if we could hike up the creek bed that empties into it. But there's not really a clear trail to get there, and it's a pretty steep gorge straight down to the lake, so it's kind of a hard hike for the kids. But they toughed it out, and nobody had to be carried. Here we are resting near the end of the lake, where it starts to get narrow.

From there, Erin and I went on to find the creek. The lake is fed just on snow melt, so both streams that empty into it were already dry, and we didn't bother hiking up them. But we made it to the end, and we got to hop across to the other side. We saw a lot of tracks in the sand there - elk, deer, and bobcat. Here's Erin at the very end of the lake:

We did remember to use the self-timer on the camera this time, so we got a rare picture of the whole family together. Somebody really needs a tan.

Robbie really liked this little tree just his size on the hike back up. You can kind of get the idea of how steep the slope is from this picture.

And of course we did the usual camping stuff...

Stared at the fire

Sang primary songs around the fire

Ate licorice (or lickerlish, as Robbie says)

Played with worms

No pictures of s'mores this time. Probaby because the photographer had a good amount of melted marshmallow on her fingers.

Rob and I got to use our new 8-person tent! We love it. The kids got to use our old 4/6-person tent. We wanted a huge tent so we'd have plenty of room inside for those camping trips when it rains and we all have to huddle somewhere. That wasn't a problem this time, but we were able to bring our chairs in there and we all hung out together while Robbie took his nap in the afternoons. Erin read to us from her Ramona books while he fell asleep, and then we would play cards or draw and color in there.

On the last day, we put the kids' tent away and we all slept in ours. It gave us a head start for packing up in the morning, and it was kind of fun to have a little slumber party.

Here's a not-too-great picture of our campsite. Our tent is behind the screen room, which is hiding one of the picnic tables. The kids' tent is to the right of the other picnic table.

So we're home, cleaned up, and back to everyday life again! It was just the right amount of vacation.