Camping aka What was I thinking

This Summer Nate and Loren Smith got the bright idea that we should go on a camping trip with the kiddos. Thus far in our marriage, we've camped a few times. Our camping has only been quick overnight trips and we always camp at the same place. Mount Graham. This is by Thatcher and where Nate has camped most of his life. At Mount Graham, you just drive up the mountain and find a good spot and we always have a good time.

Well, this trip was different. First of all this was our first time camping with babies. Camping for just one night with adults is perfectly fine, camping one night with babies is ridiculous. There is way too much stuff to bring, and it is so not worth the hastle.

So here's the details to our not so fabulous trip...

Here we are finally packed only a couple hours after we were hoping to leave. Check out Winston trying to peek over all our stuff. Though we are packed, we were not quite ready to go, because we still had to go pick up the canoe so the boys could fish. The drive was only supposed to be an hour and a half to the camp site, but we waited an hour to load the canoe and then we started our drive. Once we got into town it was dark. We headed to the lake where we were planning to camp next to. When we got there though, we realized that the site we were hoping to stay on was completely full due to the holiday weekend, and that in order to camp there we were supposed to make reservations. We were not in Thatcher any more, this was way different than what we are used to. Splendid!!!! So we drove for another 2 hours in the dark, with 4 cranky babies including me and Stacia, finally we found this make shift camp site right of this dirt road and when I say make shift, I mean it.

So now its like 10pm and we haven't eaten dinner, because we had packed tin foil dinners that we would make once we got the fire started. So we start getting everything set up, and of course it starts raining. Awesome! So we get the tent up and now have to eat our food inside. Which we tried to get rid of all the elk meat in our fridge and made dinner out of elk....hmmmm, not so tasty. It needed lots and lots of ketchup to taste good.

Since it was pitch black when we found our camp site, we kept joking how in the morning we would probably wake up to the most beautiful scenery.... nope.... we woke up to sad remnants of a forest fire.

This is all our stuff. Now the main point of the trip was to fish, after all we did rent a canoe. So after eating Breakfast, it was time to pack everything up and head to the lake..... yeah, so not worth the hastle.

'winston helping take down the tent

This phase of Winston's life was hard on me. He wanted nothing to do with me and was obsessed with his dad, sometimes he's still like this. But anyway, this picture sums it all up, check out that glare he's giving me.

I won best dressed of the trip...actually everyone kept making fun of my outfit.

First camping trip yeah!!!


Oh and did I mention that Winston did not sleep that night, he just cried and screamed for like 2 hours. And our site was surrounded by all of these fresh cow turd piles

I would say this picture sums up our trip:)