You Can't Really Call it Camping...

Once again we have survived a trip to the Great Outdoors. With the exception of a few skin cells from a few knees that got left behind in the woods, we are relatively intact. And the whole family had a fantastic time. For those of you who haven't been keeping up with all one of my previous posts that has dealt with this event... this was the trip we make every year with 10 other families from the neighborhood.



I'd like to say that we spend the weekend communing with nature, when we go on this annual foray out of the air conditioned environment we occupy on a daily basis. But we don't. For us, the trip is about communing with each other and our friends and moving the Block Party/Happy Hour to a new location for a few days. You could hardly call what we do roughing it. We more or less turn the campground into an outdoor house, complete with bedrooms, kitchen, dining room and living room (with a fireplace). If the "house" was closer to home, we could make a killing selling it on the real estate market.

Come see this idyllic and charming eleven bedroom home, with a large, open floor plan, fireplace in the living room, soaring ceilings, dining room that seats 50, and gourmet kitchen with 8 burner stove. Sorry, no running water, or central air, but the home is only a stone's throw from a lovely lake with sandy beach, not to mention the beautiful songbirds that will be your alarm clock each day. Side note: woodpeckers start looking for food EARLY. You will love the bucolic setting, with gorgeous 100 year old trees and nearby nature trails.

The kitchen always produces meals worthy of any gourmet kitchen... chili with spaghetti, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, fajitas with grilled veggies and all the fixin's... scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and pancakes for breakfast. Food always tastes better when it's cooked outdoors over an open Coleman stove fire. Especially since cooking in the great outdoors seems to require larger amounts of testosterone, so it's mostly the men who do the work. Score! The beer and margaritas are freeflowing, and the children have 30 other kids for playmates. So they stay out of the way. And there are 20 other eyes, besides your own, keeping watch over the flock. Score again!

Saturday is Beach Day... and this year, we had a the perfect beach-going day. The temperature was only in the low 80's and there was a nice breeze, so sitting in the shade was really comfortable. The water was chilly, and all of the kids had blue lips, but they really couldn't have cared less. In 5 hours, they only came out of the lake to eat lunch and ice cream sandwiches under the umbrellas. You can always recognize our group from the line of closely-clustered Costco beach umbrellas that take up half the beach. And the beach carts. We've all got those too. Something like 90% of the stuff we have to cram into the car for this 48 hour trip is for the beach day.



We really couldn't have asked for a better weekend... except for the disgustingly trashy people that we had the misfortune to be parked near (a whole other story that would be completely inappropriate to post on this blog~ leave me a comment if you want to hear it). I'll make another post with more pictures, but here's one more of my tired girls on the way home... exhausted, but already looking forward to next year!