The kids love it and lugged up all the sleeping bags, mattresses and pillows quite excitedly. Then I remembered what I hate about camping: the loading & packing of all the stuff! Gotta make sure to put the tent in last so it's the first thing on top when we get to the site. But the cooler should be packed last so it'll stay colder that way, but it's one of the biggest things so should go into the van first.... it was almost a paralyzing conundrum! Finally I had everything ready to load. Unfortunately it wasn't at 2pm as I'd planned, it was 5:30! I was going to take the girls out and set up the tent ahead of time and come back for Murray so we could eat at the site and have a bonfire. Another plan gone bad but not the end of the world.
We got everything set up and explored a bit and then turned in for the night. Checkers was incredibly restless and preferred to roam around and shake his head every 5 minutes. It was a looooooooooooong night! The kids were oblivious but Murray and I woke up not feeling too refreshed!
Nevertheless, we're camping and we're going to have fun darn it! But what to do? We shall go on a lovely nature hike and find the waterfall! We are certainly not sitting around in a tent to play iPods! I told them if they wanted to play video games in the woods, I could have thrown them over the fence in the backyard and saved myself a LOT of work! I didn't spend 5 hours baking, packing & loading to watch them do what they could do at home! They weren't very moved by my speech but didn't ask for electronics again.
We eventually found the start of the trail and began the hike. They were all excited at first, zooming along, racing around and chasing each other along the path. Then the novelty wore off after an hour and we still couldn't tell if we'd found the waterfall or not. We'd seen some water flowing over a small pile of rocks in a stream but were looking for something a little more impressive. The brochure mentioned it was "small but striking" so we kept looking, and looking and walking and looking. We ran out of trail and started back around the loop we'd taken and saw lots of other stuff in the woods but nothing that we'd consider "striking" !!! The girls weren't impressed either and made sure to let us know by subtly mentioning things like "I'M BORED. DO WE HAVE TO KEEP GOING? WHEN CAN WE STOP? CAN WE TURN BACK YET???" At one point, Murray overheard a grumbled "I feel like complaining my head off!" He lost it and said "we didn't have to come camping you know." (<---- a="" br="" murray="" s="" that="" tirade="">
We got back to the campsite and had some lunch and shortly after that, Boo got dropped off for a sleepover as Teena & Dale had a party and we won the babysitting lottery :) They were quite excited to have her there and showed her around and got her bedroll set up. They spent the rest of the afternoon at the playground and activity centre while I cleaned up lunch, read my book and then got supper ready.
That night we did have a campfire and s'mores, roasted hotdogs, sparklers and a couple Dragons Eggs that we probably weren't supposed to have. (something about no explosives in the rules I realized after). Grammie and Grandad love campfires so they joined the party and supplied the hotdogs and stayed to enjoy the evening with us, hooray, a party!
By the time our guests left and brush & flush was done, everyone was wiped and settled down without too much furor.
Teena had saved the day and brought some ear cleaning stuff so I was able to get Checkers' ears in better shape and he slept better which meant we slept better. Somewhere towards morning, I felt Murray pushed up against me, so much so that I was barely on the mattress anymore. I looked over to see what was going on and Checkers had confiscated his mattress so he was trying to get off the ground and use mine! (despite the fact that I'd made a very nice dog bed with the removable trunk liner and some towels!!!) Fussy puppies do not make great tentmates.
Lovey & Boo were awake at 6:30 and fairly chatty so that was the end of my shuteye! We tried to read quietly in the tent but that didn't last long and everyone got up for breakfast. They went for a swim while I dried out the tent and tore it down and reloaded the van. We grabbed a pizza lunch at the canteen and headed home!
Good times!!!
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| they got the "small" part right! |
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