Our family vacation finally arrived. We've been looking forward to our camping trip for a while now, and were so excited when the day finally came. We got up and headed out with a LOT of gear and food. We had a check list 5 pages long. I'm not kidding. In the midst of the craziness of camping, I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I wanted to. I should have taken a picture of the back of the van. It was packed full. We are definitely not minimalists when it comes to camping. In fact, after this week, we realized there were a few more things we 'needed' :) Apparently that's why we need a van...
We arrived at our site at 1:00 in the afternoon. It was hot. Really, really hot. I'm not sure why I thought it wouldn't be. But it was insanely hot. Our site had no shade. In hind site, we will be checking to make sure our sites in the future have shade...I really think this particular campground was more set up for campers. So in the blistering heat we started to set up our tent. We got it up pretty quickly, but when we went to stake it down, the ground was like cement. Edgar had brought a hammer, but whenever he would pound the stake it would just bend. It was extremely frustrating. So now we are hot, the kids are going insane, cuz they just want to play in the tent, we have to keep moving the dumb thing to find a 'stakeable' spot, it's hot (have I mentioned that?) and there is a storm approaching. After TWO HOURS, we finally got it set up and staked down. Oh, who am I kidding, Edgar got it staked down. The kids had been amused by playing with buckets of water, and I was trying to help, but I don't think I really was.
Once the site was set, we drove around a bit (to cool off...) to see what was around the area. When we came back to start dinner, it was raining. So we found a picnic shelter at the campsite, bought some charcoal, and grilled our chicken. I WISH I had taken a picture of Edgar standing in the pouring rain over a grill holding an umbrella. It would have been funny, if we weren't so hungry. After over an hour of waiting for the chicken to finish cooking we finally ate. The rain had stopped, and we were hoping for a nice campfire. Then we saw another storm coming. The REAL storm...At this point we were kinda over it...so we went to the tent and got ready for bed.
Then it started to rain. And rain and rain and rain. This was the view from the tent. We got 2 inches. That's a lot of rain when you are staying in a tent. At one point put my hand down on the floor of the tent, and it felt like the top of a water bed. There was a river flowing under us I am sure...Our little Coleman tent held up pretty well. It was leaking a little bit at the seams, but nothing too bad. It was raining REALLY hard, so we were just glad it held up.
I think Edgar was pretty pooped out by this point. We both were thinking of just packing up and going home-a very frustrating day. Stuff memories are made of, though :)
Not surprisingly, the kids never had any idea anything was even wrong. They LOVE the tent, and were thrilled to have some family time in the tent. They played for a while before going to bed.
It was a rough start to the trip, but we made it. And now we can say we've camped in a storm before. There was plenty of thunder and lightning along with the torrential downpour. So we are just that much more experienced...We also know that apparently we need to get titanium stakes if we ever go back to this campsite...
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