1st camping trip with the boy

While I'm not the best at establishing and keeping traditions, one that I want to take very seriously is an annual camping trip with Mason. Since he's at that ripe age of 3 I figured it would be a good summer to start. The problem is that I'm somewhat new to the planning phase. Still, I've learned a good deal from my father and father-in-law in terms of supplies. For a one-night trip, we were certainly ready.


Where I lack in experience is in the administration realm. I had not made any reservations, so we went to an area near Deckers with 5 public no-reservations-required sites. My rookie mistake was that we left Saturday morning and ended up seeing this at every single site:


So after 4 hours of driving around I had to make an executive decision. Luckily Mason was feeling flexible at that point and was on board. So, we went home.

Still, we made the best of it ..... we weren't allowed to go inside, and mom wasn't allowed to come out back. And as you can see, Mason was so excited about the sleeping arrangements that he wanted to go to bed at 4:30.


After some convincing otherwise, we cooked hotdogs over the stove...


...played "Stolf" (Stump Golf, a new Camp Elim favorite....or in Mason's case, Stick Golf)...


...went to a local park to kill some daylight...


...and made our way back to roast some marshmallows.


We did cheat a little, as I brought out the laptop connected to an extension cord to watch Spiderman as we fell asleep. But in the morning we got right back at it. After peeing on the fence we got dressed...


...cooked some eggs, bacon, and sausage for breakfast....


...and then went on a nature hike on the Stonegate trails across the street:


In the end it was probably a better "trip" for a toddler, as he was ready to call it quits at 9am after the hike. Perhaps we'll consider the backyard trip again next year and watch Spiderman 2. Then when he's 5 we'll make a man out of him and do a 3-mile backpacking trip into the mountains.