Community Camping

I haven’t slept in days. Not that I haven’t tried, but camping with a bunch of kids just lends itself to no sleep. We left on Thursday night, after swimming lessons were over (because we can’t possibly MISS a swimming lesson), and drove a couple of hours to a beautiful campground near my hometown. We always called it Community even though the Manti-LaSal people have christened it something else.

The first night we didn’t do anything too exciting except set up camp and cook a bunch of hot dogs. My girls had all been camping with their YW group and their Scout groups, so naturally they wanted to sing around the campfire. This didn’t set well with our grumpy neighbor one fire over. Just before 11:00 he showed up making all sorts of complaints. I disappeared into the tent with the little ones and tried to settle them down. But I don’t know what you do about a crying baby…usually the camping community is much kinder than it was to us. In fact, I heard other babes in the night and I just felt bad for those poor moms trying to shush their little ones in a strange, cold, and very dark place. I don’t know how anyone could sleep anyway, just like when we camped at my MIL’s house on the 4th, the leaves from the quaking aspens make more noise than the people.

We dragged ourselves out at the crack of dawn and hiked the half block to the restroom. I was glad I had planned cold cereal for breakfast. I just wasn’t in the mood to build a fire. Despite the rough beginning, the trip turned out to be surprisingly fun. My sweetie got a chance to fish and actually caught one! The girls were very surprised and then very upset when he said we were going to eat it. Finally he ended up letting it go even though it had very little life left in it.

In the afternoon we filled up all the rafts and let the kids paddle them all over the lake. I even had a chance, but the Prima Donna and I couldn’t get our paddles in sync. Finally I just let her row us in. After that we headed back to camp for a while and those who wanted to fish walked back over to the lake. Teach and I (with a little help from Gamer) built the evening fire and we roasted Brats and more dogs for the kids. At some point the kids took the rafts back to the lake. We played lots of Toy Story Uno and a silly game Princess calls Scum.

After another sleepless night but without the rude neighbor, we got up early this morning. Eggs and pancakes later and it was time to break camp. It took us about 2 hours to pack the van and Bossy and Gamer’s new truck. We finally got everyone loaded and realized that someone had left the lights on in the van and the battery was dead. Thank goodness we had jumper cables. We were soon on the road and headed back to civilization. After a quick stop to visit both grandmas and grab a bite of lunch, we drove the rest of the way home.

It took us another 2 hours to unload the van and get most of the stuff put away. But I guess we didn’t get enough of camping, because the Dog Walker set up the tent in the backyard and decided we all needed to sleep outside for one more night. This time my sweetie cooked a delicious Dutch Oven rather than a bunch of hot dogs. Now if I could just figure out how to sleep…