So Brad and I are very happy to have survived our first camping trip with both the boys. Don't get me wrong--we had a really fun time, but it was also definitely a learning experience for us. We had only camped once with Aiden a few years ago. So here's the story...
We first got in to our campsite around 7 and first thing that went wrong was that the lantern fell out of the back of the car when Brad opened it and the glass around it broke...luckily it was still functional and it had only broke in two spots (it didn't shatter or anything). It was pretty cold that night it got down close to 40 degrees and that night we were visited by some racoons...Brad kept getting up trying to scare them away until finally he just put all of our food supplies into the back of the car. They managed to escape with a bag of fruit and all of our bread. And then once the racoons finally went away Ryder woke up screaming and crying...luckily it was only for 15-20 minutes. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the zipper to the front of our tent also would not close properly all of a sudden that night (the teeth on the zipper got messed up or something) so we spent a good 30-45 minutes trying to get it to close...finally Brad managed to get it almost all the way down and then the rest the trip we had to just crawl through the bottom zipper of the tent and not touch the other one. To say the least I think the best thing about that night was eating some warm peach cobbler we had made in the dutch oven before we went to bed.
Saturday, despite being pretty tired from the night before we had a lot of fun! We started out having to run into town to buy some sandwich bread since it had all been stolen. And then our friends, the Rhea family, came up for the day. We took all the kids miniature golfing at the little course in the campgrounds and then the kids just had a ton of fun playing together in the woods and in the tent :) We also made tin foil dinners and some s'mores that night and ended the day with going to the playground for a little bit until our friends had to leave. The kids had so much fun playing together and let me tell you they were great firewood collectors! :) The boys slept really well that night and we didn't have any more unwelcome visitors since we now took the precaution of putting all our food stuff in the car at night. It was also 10 degrees warmer that night so it was more comfortable.
Sunday we went miniature golfing again with the boys (It was Aiden's first request that day :) And then we went hiking on some of the trails that backed up to our campsite. It was a beautiful day and really the whole trip we had perfect weather besides the first night being kinda chilly. Kentucky is so pretty in the spring and summer! And we had a lot of fun hiking and we even saw some carriages with horses tied up next to them at one point. We think that they must have belonged to some Amish people that were visiting the park. So that was pretty cool to see. That night we made dutch oven pizza which really turned out pretty well. The only downer that day was that Brad and I both started to have bad sinus pain that day and by the night Brad was all stuffy, I lucked out and felt better the next morning after a good nights sleep and Brad was a little less stuffy the next day too.
Overall the trip was fun and it was really nice to be outdoors and escape for a few days. Ryder was just hard to watch the whole trip. Our neighbors across the field from us had two dogs....so yeah it was impossible to keep him away so that was hard to have to keep chasing after him while we kept trying to prepare meals or just get things set up. Luckily our neighbors were pretty nice about him always trying to come over there and play with their dogs, but man we could just not get Ryder to stay with us. He also at one point escaped down one of the hiking trails behind us and would have just kept going forever without us....he is one independent boy :) But everything worked out in the end and I think everyone had fun despite some of the troubles we ran into!
