Our Family Camp Week

I'm going to pause the Europe trip posts for a day to talk about last week.  We went to church for an ice cream social and fireworks on 4th of July.

What you're seeing here is a plank, accessed by two ladders.  There were scads of fireworks set up on the plank.  Katie and a friend scrambled up the ladders with torches and set off a couple at a time for the rest of us in the audience.  

In my head, this was a cute photo opportunity.  I wanted to get a picture of 3 kids, smiling, with sparklers.  

I took about 8 shots.  This was as good as it got.  Sigh.  

Grumman, who missed me while I was in Europe, was a little froke out to see the suitcase appear again.  Poor guy.  What's the suitcase for?  Family camp.  

When we stopped to gas up Matilda en route to camp, I looked up and thought, "You might be in gold country if..."

So here we are in nature.  I brought my colored pencils and sketch pad, and I drew the bench in this picture, but I don't have a picture of it to share.  Maybe next time.  

Family camp was a church thing, and several families attended.  Each family had a cute little cabin.  (I drew our cabin, too.)  Ours was Matterhorn.  

Inside was primitive, with 9 bunks (yikes, can you imagine the smell??) and a table.

We did have pleasant weather.  This was our first year, and it was in the 80s each day.  I heard it was over 100* the previous year.  This does not sound like fun.  

Miss Hannah found a "piano" to play, causing me to have "Come Thou Fount" stuck in my head for most of the 4 days.  

The first night, there was laser tag after dinner.  

Unfortunately, Jack fell in the dark and banged up his knee pretty good, so he was hobbling the next day.  Here, he's having breakfast in a hammock.  

There's a lot of nature at camp.  We saw deer, a rabbit, squirrels, lizards, butterflies and moths, large ants, a gopher, a woodpecker, several other birds, and a bird's egg.  

I think that's a squirrel near the base of the tree.  

I wore Hannah out with a hike nature walk.  In her defense, it was in the 80s, and we wandered for about 40 minutes, stopping to look at moss, lichen, sticks, bugs, rocks, trees, etc.  One thing I liked about camp is that there were lots of benches.  So we'd sit & observe for a bit before moving on.  

Katie had kids her own age from church & school there, so we pretty much saw her only at meals.  She ran amok with the herd and was totally covered in dirt most of the time.  Hannah did not have anyone to hang out with, so she followed me around the whole time.  I found myself wishing there were more planned activities.  Or I had brought her a book, like War & Peace, to occupy some of her time.  

There was target practice one morning.  

The obligatory family picture.  Jack looks delighted.  

Fire ring in the daytime

Fire ring at night.  S'mores happened.  I discovered I still don't like marshmallows.  

Another "this looks like a photo op" moment.  My, "You guys go get in the wagon for a picture!" was met with eye rolls.  I'm going with they were tired from 3 nights of subpar sleep.  

Poor Matilda got filthy.  The day we left camp, we were 21 miles from the closest branch of our chain car wash.  When we stopped there, their soap dispenser was broken so they weren't able to wash any cars.  We came all the way back into town here and ran through the car wash we usually use.  

Then we stopped at the library.

Then we went home and unpacked everything.  When I opened the back of the van, I discovered poor Matilda was still not fully clean, as there were brown water spots on the hatchback.  I took her through the wash again today.

 

I discovered that another drawer track had broken in our absence.  I guess they're all getting brittle at this point.  

On a whim, I decided to try one of those foot detox things.  It's like a giant band aid, crossed with a tea bag.  This is what it looked like before I put it on.  

I didn't mind wearing them.  It felt a little different, but not unpleasant.  

 

Next morning, I was a little surprised to find my foot was bright yellow and kinda stinky.  I ended up stepping into the shower and dropping the patches out into my waiting wastebasket.  

We came home on Saturday, and we're leaving on our next adventure Thursday, so that's not a whole lot of down time in between.  Also, I volunteered to help set up the school rummage sale, so we're spending 2 days a week doing that for the next few weeks.  The girls found several "treasures" they want to bring home.  Paul does not want them bringing home rummage.  Should be interesting.