The weekend before, the girls got their last taste of weekend city life dancing it up at the Fisherman's Feast in the North End.
After the dancing, the next day, Elliot got her scrub on by helping prepare for camping by scrubbing down the coolers in the yard. She is a natural with water work. Look at her wringing that sponge.
On to Terrace Pines Campground in New Hampshire. A lovely 2+ hour drive from home, punctuated by a stop in the quaint Portsmouth NH seaside town where we loaded up on a lunch of lobster rolls, clam chowder, and fish sandwiches to power us through camp set up.
Here is our little, not so secluded site. Laying out the tents and setting up camp.
It was a 100+ degrees (or felt like it) and perfectly clear & sunny. My job was to keep everyone hydrated and cool headed. As you can see below, Elliot's job was to supervise tent set-up by barking orders from her little hammock chair.
Our new tent is set-up and looking good.
Time for a swim in the little pond. Alex won all of the underwater swimming challenges and the toad catching contests.
After a quick dip, it was back to the camp site to forage for wood and start dinner. By forage for wood, I mean hike to the general store and buy 2 cords. And by start dinner, I mean wrap everything we brought in tin foil to throw on the fire. Below, Alex & Ben get to work on the fire. Who is supervising this kid and letting him do this barefoot?! Parents beware when the Aunties and Uncles are in charge of your kids.
It is starting to get dark above as the crew waits for the foil packets to cook. I heard some thunder in the distance (storms were expected, but showed no signs all day). Then Mindy proclaimed it would not rain for at least half an hour so we could eat. And then a HUGE gust of wind tore through the site, bringing some light rain and a whole lot of thunder and lightning with it. There are no pictures from my camera of this episode, or of the tree branch that fell into our site missing Mindy barely, I was too busy trying to unstrap Elliot from how we tethered her to the table before it blew over. We threw the loose items in the car - including a whole pan of corn on the cob, and took our dinners to our tents. Where we listened to it rain, lightning and hail for 40 minutes. Chris' radio came through with "This is the emergency broadcast system...severe storms...hail...70 mile an hour winds .... until 11:30PM." It was only 7:15! We debated abandoning camp, which rationally, we should have done. But we stayed. The bad storm was only about 40 minutes. It cleared and we were able to resume s'mores before it turned to lighter rain the rest of the night. The next morning, everyone was amazed we slept in our tents (and stayed dry!) especially since the storm blew a porch awning off a neighboring trailer and many others went to their cars. Ahhhh, the joys of being naive campers - we just didn't know any better.
Above, Elliot shows her displeasure at being put to bed in a rain storm, in a tent, in her PackNPlay. I don't know what she was complaining about, she had more room than anyone in that whole tent! So what if we did not bring her a sleeping bag. Who puts a crib in a 4 person tent? Well, thank goodness we did, because she actually went to bed relatively "on time" and slept through all our racket.
But by morning, the joke was on us, because below, you will see our little early bird up getting the worms. Rummaging around our camp as the sun is barely up. Yep. It's 5:30 AM. Ughhh.
Time for Cowboy Coffee and Orange Eggs. The orange halves in the fire are filled with beaten eggs and cooking for breakfast. Very fun concept, and if we did not have pans, somebody might have eaten these instead of timidly taking one bite. But, we had cheesy scrambled eggs, chicken apple sausage breakfast burritos and donuts that trumped my camp Orange Eggs.
Hiking below with Elliot at 6AM to let the other campers sleep.
Later we dragged the other campers to our hike site.
Then, it was back to camp to SOMEHOW try and fit everything back in our 2 cars. Look at the ridiculous amount of crap we had on site. Lesson learned, now that we know we can camp with a 1.1, 2.9, & 6.9 year old, we need to do it 2 nights to make the planning and packing and setting up worth our while.
And, this picture pretty much sums up camping for Alex & Elliot - who probably did not think camping was all that much work after all. What's not to love about Pokemon & Tostitos, or hanging in your crib with a bottle of juice watching the birds while all the big people around you toil away at busywork?
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