Impromptu Camping Trip

We haven't been camping in close to a year.  Not that we don't want to, but it's a little difficult trying to sucker convince someone into taking care of the critters while we're away.  So last November we packed up our camping gear and headed down to the State Park conveniently located no more than seven miles from our front door.

I could then go camping with the family but was still be able to make a trip home at dusk to milk & close up the critters then do the same in the morning and not have to be away from our camping trip for very long.

So this weekend I made a split second decision that we should go camping again.  Saturday afternoon we dug out the air mattress (Paul & I have both since passed the age at which we will sleep on the bare ground) and tent, sleeping bags, cooking gear and obligatory marshmallows, chocolate bars & graham crackers.

The tent went up without much fuss at all and our sleeping accommodations for the evening were set up in no time flat.  Then Rhiannon and I went to making our fire ring.

View from inside our tent.  Wilderness galore!

Grandma and Papa came to visit (bearing German Chocolate cake) as well as one of Rhiannon's friends, her mother and her older sibling.  Supper consisted of hot dogs, mac & cheese, chips & dips. Dessert was, of course, S'mores.  Nothing like molten hot sugar and liquid-magma-chocolate smooshed between two thin cookies erroneously called "crackers".  And Second Dessert was German Chocolate cake.  I actually remembered to bring out the little light-up necklaces for the girls so we could keep an eye on them during their after-dark running-around-like-sugar-filled-crazy-kids.  I LOVE those things.

After everyone else went home, we crammed into the tent, zipped ourselves up in our sleeping bags and drifted off to sleep to the sounds of crickets, barred owl conversations and leaves rustling in the trees.  The moon was so bright last night that we didn't even need a flashlight to walk to the bathroom.   Then come sun-up, we unzipped our tent to face the great outdoors and were greeted by the local wildlife......

No, we didn't bring Charlie and Outside Kitty with us to the campground.  Our front yard was our campground.  Because I'm too darned lazy to pack the car up but I kind'a told Rhiannon that we were going camping this weekend and she wouldn't let me live it down until we were in a tent and cooking something over an open fire.

I made sausage-egg-cheese-whatever burritos over the campfire for breakfast, we cleaned up our campsite, put the tent away and came inside.

Just starting breakfast.

So all in all, it was a Win-Win situation.  I kept my promise to Rhiannon that we'd go camping and I didn't get yelled at by any Park Rangers for walking around the campsite in my skivvies.