We arrived home from LA at 3am on Saturday and we had just enough time to unload from LA and re-load for camping…and we made it to the kids’ swim class, too. Apparently, the high heat followed us home. It was in the 90s on our first afternoon/evening in Little Basin!
We went with H. and the girls as well as H’s parents (A. stayed home due to back pain) and got a great set of campsites (#18 and #19). They wouldn’t have been great if we weren’t together (too close together for 2 separate parties), but for 3 families spread across the two sites, it was fantastic!
We were also there during the week so few people were around us and we were able to cut through an unoccupied camp to get to the bathroom (which was about 2-3 minutes walking distance away)!
Why is Chloe always in this dress, you might wonder…Well, she does have more clothes, but she has decided that this is her “minnie mouse” dress and she “loves” minnie. Plus, she suddenly sprang this, “if I wear shorts, I’ll look like a boy” thing on me. Whoa. Where’d that come from???
The kids have a Pavlovian response to evening campfires–“can we make s’mores”???
The biggest kids — Dylan and Taliana — took orders for marshmallows: “golden”, “plain”, “burnt”…you name it, you got it. Then, they kindly did roasting duties. Chloe asked for one plain and one roasted…and then she snuck one in on her own (except I caught her!! And when I started to say something, she crammed the whole thing in her pie-hole!).
You might also wonder why Dylan looks like he’s part of the zombie apocalpyse with that white face! That’s zinc sunscreen.
This was yummy!
We also made ice-cream this year–the first time in several years that we’ve dragged the ice cream ball to camp!
We made an entire quart of coconut vanilla-almond chocolate chip ice cream and mmm it was good!
We probably would have been content to skip the ice cream save for Chloe’s requests. And, since she couldn’t ride her balance bike to keep up with the big kids, I felt a little obligated to let her have her way on something
But all of the kids seemed to be having fun helping mix ingredients, too.
We didn’t just have desserts on this trip, though! The kids did a whole lot of biking–the big kids found all of the shortcuts back to our camp site!
We also went on a pretty steep 2-mile hike that had 500 feet of elevation gain! The kids did pretty well! K. got tired so Cameron is showing her how to get more energy for going up hill.
The kids also set up a fort and a base among the tree stumps….
and climbed trees.
and played games!
It was another fun camping trip, despite heat, mosquitos (though we managed to dodge a significant number of bites–poor T. and K. were eaten alive!)!.
