While we didn’t make it camping during Rachel’s fall break, the weekend after she went back to school we did. The weather had turned cooler in Tucson and we figured we’d better go before it got any colder. Turns out if we had waited until the following week we would have had probably 20 degrees warmer weather. As it was, we were cold. I knew that when packing, so I packed the kids warm clothes, two jackets each, lots of blankets. But didn’t get myself a jacket. I thought about it several times, but only when I was already busy with something else. By the time I was able to go get a jacket I had forgotten about it. Thankfully, my hubby is a real man, and real man don’t need jackets. Apparently. He let me use his. And not to take away from his manliness, but he used a Snuggie for his jacket when it got really cold. Good thing I thought to grab our stack of blankets that happened to include a Snuggie. :)
After we got camp setup the first order of business was dinner. Hot dogs and chips. Oh yeah, and chili, which we remembered when Jacob (who had cooked for all of us and was eating last) was on his last hot dog.
Camping for our family at this stage with 3 young kids has two purposes: sleeping in a tent and roasting marshmallows. We took care of the marshmallows first:
Then we slept in a tent. Or Jacob and the kids slept in a tent. I laid in a tent with my family. I tried to keep the kids covered so they wouldn’t get too cold, and I occasionally would fall asleep for 30 minutes or so before a leg in the back, or my arm falling asleep from laying weird on it, or from Ryan laying on it, would wake me up. We had put Rachel’s and Annie’s sleeping bags together to make one huge bag (much to Annie’s dismay—she did NOT like it, and let it be known to the whole campground). Halfway through the night I moved in from my sleeping bag, and about an hour later Ryan joined us. Ryan stayed awake for about 30-40 minutes, though was thankfully content to just lay there without getting up to explore or anything. After that he slept straight through until morning. And I was happy to have morning arrive so I could get up and get the fire going.
Luckily I had gone up with the expectation of no sleep, so the fact that I got a few snippets of sleep was like a bonus.
That morning was COLD. A co-worker of Jacob’s happened to be camping in the same campground, and he told us it was down to 35 degrees that morning. Pretty darn cold for us Arizonans who get cold sometimes if it drops below 70. We had hot chocolate by the fire, then, having accomplished the marshmallows and tent sleeping, got camp packed up and headed out.
Luckily Jacob’s co-worker saw we were leaving and asked us for a ride up to Windy Point so he could call his wife. It’s only a mile or two further up the mountain from where we camped, so we took him and had a chance to do some “hiking” or at least exploring to make our camping trip more of an outdoor experience than just freezing the night away.
The kids LOVED all the climbing over rock formations and being able to feel like they were way up high and to see far and wide.
They are all good little rock climbers. It makes me want to go get some gear and start taking them rock climbing. They would totally love it.
It was a successful camping trip. Two camping trips in one year is a new record for us since having kids. We’ll wait until it warms up again in the spring before we think about attempting another one. No more of that freezing-our-patooties-off camping!
