June 6, 2021-Collide Camping Week

(click for today's pictures)

I struggled with writing a name for this week's little trip. I settled on Collide camping trip since the big kids are at Collide while the rest of us are camping. And who knows our camping trip may just turn into a whole week.

Robby and I didn't jump up when our alarm rang this morning. I think that we were pretty tired from our painting yesterday. I thought that Robby was awake when I asked him last night if we would hire someone the next time that we needed to paint. I ended up waking him up, and he did mumble something about "probably not."

We had church this morning followed by Sunday school. I think that we had 14 in our class. Folks are slowly starting to bring their kids back to church. My kids have heard me say over and over lately that I want them to be people that bring their children to church-all the time, every time, no excuses. Though 14 in a Sunday school class is nearing being full-now our class is full of sweet little kiddos so it is just fine. But Keaton's class is a bit rowdy and 14 of them would be too many for me.

After church, we rushed home-we were ready to go and Bentley needed to potty. It started pouring right when it was time for us to leave for church. She refused to go potty in that rain, so she was put in her kennel without pottying. She was fine though and cared more about greeting all of us than getting outside.

We ate lunches, folded laundry, and changed clothes before loading up in the camper. The first little bit of our trip, Bentley was pretty antsy. She was walking back and forth through the camper. We eventually decided that she was looking for Reagan, Anderson and Graham.She eventually settled and before any of us knew it, we were pulling into Lake Dregray State Park.

Even though I was so close to all of this during college, I never knew that this place was so large. We wound around and wound around until we eventually made it to our campsite. We tucked back in the woods on a pretty secluded site. And when I say pretty secluded, I mean there is just one other camper in this loop. 

Later Robby wondered if we should have driven around to look for another site, but this one is just pretty perfect. One of the first things that we do when we arrive is to level the camper. The site was pretty unlevel today, but man we got this thing perfectly level. However, Robby said that we are so level that the shower drains a bit slowly.

We walked around the loop, and the girls and I even snagged some firewood from a deserted site. We didn't get anything out since the rain looked like it was coming in fast. We did decide to all load up and go and check in. 

I stamped my State Park booklet, and then we drove around the park. We saw pretty much everything and did stop at the swimming hole just to look at it. After checking the weather and seeing lots of rain over the next few days, we decided to let the kids swim if they wanted to.

Of course they wanted to so we ran back to the camper for them to change. It is funny because those spur of the moment things are not as easy with so many others. We went back to the swimming area, and they swam and swam despite the thunder.

We had thrown in life jackets and were glad that we did. The kids enjoyed swimming, with their life jackets, to the bouys at the edge of the swimming area. They did that twice and were pretty exhausted when they returned. They were able to swim for probably about an hour and a half.

We thought that the thunder was going to interrupt our swimming, but it never did. In front of us where the kids were swimming, the weather looked perfect. Behind us though it looked like the bottom was about to fall out. 

When we did go back to the camper, the kids took showers at the bathhouse. Then after much more checking the weather, we decided that it wasn't going to be too wet. So we pulled out the tent, lights, rug and grill.

The girls helped plan most of our meals for this part of the week. Keaton picked chicken spaghetti and that is what we had tonight. We heated it up on the grill while we also toasted bread. The bread was buttered with butter that the girls had shaken and made tonight. Making butter was one thing that Campbell added to our summer bucket list so that is now marked off the list.

We had a pretty relaxing evening-eating a delicious supper, watching the Hogs, making s'mores and just having a super great time. It was a bit difficult to get the Hogs game on-our internet signal isn't too strong. So the best place for Robby's phone to be so we could see the game was on top of the camper. Robby climbed up there, plugged his phone up and threw down the cord so we could watch the game on the tv. Despite the ending of the game, I told Robby that I could go home tonight and be perfectly happy. He wasn't too sure about that since we have worked pretty hard today setting everything up.

It has been a great day though. And it looks like from the pictures that the big kids are having a really great time at camp.

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