Birthday Camping Attempt

For my birthday this year I asked Nathan for one thing...to go camping! It's been quite a while and all my family had a fun camping trip in Idaho recently. I was jealous of awesome scenery pictures and Facebook posts! We researched a good place for quite a while and whether we wanted to do it at a theme park, water park, national park, in a cabin, in a tent, or in an r.v. We decided on traditional camping in the tent of a national forest in Virginia. It was the cheapest option and also more of camping than the other options. We spent a couple days getting everything ready and packed up to go for 4 days. We checked the weather and mapped out the perfect camping spot. It was supposed to be in the low 80's when we reserved the spot.

The day to leave came, Nathan got off work early, and I was scrambling to get stuff done but the kids were not cooperating! It took forever and we didn't get to leave until around 5 or 6 p.m. which was much later than we had planned. When we got there we got things set up for the most part and I organized the tent while Nathan started a fire to make some dinner for our starving little family. We finally got some dinner and enjoyed our night. Unfortuantely, the camping spot wasn't what we had planned though and it was very warm for being so late. We retired to bed after a while and while we slept pretty good that night we woke up feeling like we just jumped out of the shower or went swimming. It was so humid. We didn't have to much for plans that day other than maybe hang out at the campground, play games, and let Kamden run around, or maybe go to the pond.

Little did we know that it would get really REALLY hot and humid that day. It was in the 90's by noon and the temperature kept climbing. Kamden was a sweaty mess, Kali was overheating and we were trying to deal with two kids that were both a sweaty, miserable mess. I spent much of my time in the suburban trying to cool off while I nursed Kaliana and we went driving around just to cool off. Let's be honest I had a bit of a break down, and in tears I told Nathan of my woes and how this was not the idea I had in mind when I wanted to go camping. If we weren't dealing with one hot, grumpy child we were dealing with another. There was no time for relaxation and I was completely disappointed.  I just knew that there was no way we would make it four days so that day around 4 we packed everything up and headed on our way. It started pouring on us the last 15 minutes of packing up so by the time we were out of there we didn't regret leaving one bit. We spent the rest of the camping vacation in an air conditioned house, venturing outside every now and then to use the grill!

These pictures are my proof of the hot, sweaty, dirty mess we all were!