Happy, Tired & a Little Sunburnt

 

So I promised to tell you about our first camping trip with the girls, so here it is! 🙂

We, being the greedy locals that we are, took advantage of our rights as the hometown crowd by setting up our tent on our chosen site a night early.  We found an amazing spot on Huckleberry Island that friends had told us had a great little sandy beach.  It was absolutely fabulous!  Definitely our new favourite spot.  It was perfect for the kids to play in and out of the water and there was plenty of space to set up our tent on sandy soil covered with soft pine needles…which around here is like discovering gold!  Most places, especially on Georgian Bay crown land, you are literally pitching your tent on a rock.  So this was a bonus! 🙂

Since this is a popular spot for people to go camping it includes a fire pit, rack for cooking, ‘toilet’ in the bushes, table/shelf built between two trees and rope to hang your food in trees overnight.  For those of you who are not campers, this is so that the wildlife does not get into your food.  Bears and raccoons are not welcome midnight guests!

               

Finding this spot on Thursday evening was just such a special gift from God.  The girls loved it and seeing it beforehand helped them be even more excited!

Friday I scurried around all day crazily trying to get everything packed and Kirby was able to get off work by 4 o’clock, so we loaded everything up into the work boat. I will add in here that we’ve been abundantly blessed by Kirby’s employers at Rockscape Design. Their generosity is a challenge and huge blessing to us! We are so grateful for them and the many ways they have blessed us in the past few years.

The girls were so excited to get there and explore our ‘home’ for the weekend. They went into the water briefly Friday evening already, but didn’t last long since it was pretty chilly. Kirby ended up having to run back home for a few things I forgot…the camera battery and memory card and his swim trunks! Sigh. One of those moments where you go…really?!

Once we had everything we wanted and needed there, we settled in for some FAMILY TIME. Was awesome having all the time in the world to just be together and enjoy the outdoors. I forgot how exciting things like camping are for kids. It was so much fun watching the girls set up their beds in the tent (complete with ONE stuffy Mommy allowed them to bring), run around exploring, searching for caterpillars, finding a perfect spot to build a fort with Daddy and pretending to drive the boat.  They love campfires at home, but cooking all our meals over the fire was so fun for them.  Alexa thought that was her favourite part of camping 🙂  We got to stay up late eating s’mores, have story time beside the campfire, have chips and PB&J at random times, go for bear hunts in the bushes and swim in the beautiful, pure waters of Georgian Bay.  The girls slept great in the tent, bundled up in their fuzzy onesies and sleeping bags.  Our tent was on a bit of a hill and Alexa ended up at Daddy’s feet by morning, curled up in a little ball somewhere in the fluffy depths of her sleeping bag.  We all had fun doing dishes in the lake, though an awful lot of dishsoap seemed to disappear over the weekend with two small pairs of hands squirting!  Akeisha got to help Daddy drive the boat and practise her lefts and rights 🙂  Both girls hate porta-potties, so this makeshift toilet in the bushes with spider webs just under the rim and an awful stench was not the best experience!  Every time we had to take a trip there we’d talk about being brave all the way there and then sing songs to distract us while we got the job done…this is something I started awhile ago at a park where we needed to use the portable toilet.  It works! 🙂

Mommy and Daddy?  Well…we just relaxed in the sun and water, enjoying our beautiful daughters ❤

The girls are already anxious to go again…and so am I.  It’s the best thing in the world for a family trying to spend lots of time together and shut out the rest of the world.  I’m not hard core enough to be able to head out tenting for a week, but a weekend is perfect.  Easy, fun and FREE vacation 🙂

AF