.........But before I get into that, I just wanted to send a quick "Thank You" to all of my readers that sent me encouraging messages this last week. Knowing you are all pulling for me feels great! To be honest, I am in kind of a rut right now. Not feeling the greatest physically or mentally. BUT, I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even if I can't quite see it yet.
Now, back to the smell of campfires. I love the smell of campfires, and it was quite unfortunate that we are in the middle of a drought right now. Otherwise, our CAMPING TRIP last weekend would have been just a tad better. I won't complain though, I had a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. It just stunk that after being at the campground for 5 minutes we were informed by the
evil old lady with no sense of humor nice lady that runs the campground that there were to be no fires. Though we did find a sign in the bathroom that said we could have a "cook" fire instead of a campfire. I'm getting a little carried away with myself. Let's start at the beginning.....
Since Keith's entire family
(wife, brother, sister, brother-in-law) is
jobless (they all work for the same company
- except me) we decided to go camping. We ended up in the Silver Lake Recreation Area of the
Withlacoochee State Forest at the
Crooked River Camground. The campground is only about 25 minutes from the house, so we loaded up on Friday and we were off. After setting up the tents, we had our run in with the
vampire nice camp lady. We had a nice chicken dinner
that my brother-in-law burnt to a crisp and then froze our butt's off for the rest of the night. Well, that is until we started a real campfire. That kept us a little warmer, but we had to keep throwing water on it everytime a car came. (In case it was the vampire again).
The kids kept themselves busy with the glo necklaces that we brought with us. The necklaces were a bluish-purple color and so they were then called the "Blurples". They ran up and down the camground amusing all of the other guests while trying to stay warm.
It was so cold that my Sister-in-law and her husband left at 6:30 Saturday morning to run home and get some more blankets. Once the sun came up, it started to warm up outside and we had a nice breakfast of sausage & biscuits with scrambled eggs. Since it was our first time cooking biscuits on the grill, they came out
burnt as hell a little well done, but they were still edible.
After that we went down to the
nasty, slimy, freezing cold, water hole and let the kids do some fishing, swimming, and playing on the trampoline.
We returned and had dinner which consisted of steak, sauteed mushrooms & onions, baked beans, and fried potatoes.
See what foodstamps will buy? The weather was much nicer on Sat. night and we were able to actually hang out around the
camp fire cook fire.
Then I went raccoon hunting with my brother-in-laws & niece. We saw about 10 raccoons. They were coming at us from all directions and were even up in the trees above us. It was quite an experience.
OK, enough of my babbling. Will catch you up on the rest of life soon.
Check out the rest of our camping pictures
here.
Do you enjoy camping with your family? If not, what other things do you like to do outside?
I love how they were trying to start a fire.... In.the.rain. You can even see that Andrew is hiding newspapers under his shirt so they don't get wet. In.the.rain. FYI - the fire never stayed lit until the last day when the sun finally came out.
