Over the weekend the whole family went on a Cub Scout family camp out. In the past when the Scouts had camp outs, I let Charlie (or twice my dad when Charlie and I were out of town) take Andy, using the excuse that the girls were too small or would be bored or it would be too difficult. Well, that worked fine in the past, but this Pack is very family oriented and emphasized that this was a FAMILY camp out and since everybody is potty trained and sleeps through the night and I had no other excuses to get out of it we all went.
The girls love to be outside, so they were really excited about the trip. Andy was relatively excited because he was going to hang out with his scouting friends. It was just Charlie and me that weren't very excited. Okay, maybe just me. I will admit that I was not very helpful in getting all the gear together and getting the car packed, although once we got there I wished that I had been more involved because I didn't know where anything was packed in the car.
The original plan was for us to pick Charlie up and work and leave his car in the parking garage for the weekend and drive from there to the mountains. Unbelievably for the first time since he started working there they sent out a note Friday morning telling everyone they could not park in the garage that particular weekend because they were repainting the stripes. Seriously? THIS weekend? So he came home and we packed a few more things into the car and headed out. Fortunately and unfortunately we ended up getting to the campground a few hours after we had planned. It was fortunate because you could see the rain and lightning right where we were supposed to be as we drove up, unfortunately because although the rain had stopped by the time we got there the sun had already gone down and we had to pitch the tent in the dark. Well, except for the headlights on the van and my built-in flashlight on my phone (which I was using illegally because they had banned all electronic devices for the weekend). Since Charlie hadn't set up the tent since the last Scout camp out and I never had, it took us way too long to get it up and get the car unpacked.
Once we finally got everything into the tent we took the kids to the bathroom two campsites over and brushed their teeth. It was starting to thunder and lightening and within five minutes of getting back to the tent it started to rain. Hard. So hard that Andy came to sleep between Charlie and me on the air mattress because the thunder and lightening was making him nervous. So incredibly hard that Sarah woke up in the middle of the night and had to change her clothes because they, and her sleeping bag and her pillow, were all wet and then had to climb in bed with me to keep warm. It was nice to have a hot little body next to me, but a little cramped (luckily by this time Andy had gone back to his spot on the floor). By the time we woke up the next morning everything in the tent was wet. Since we were up in the mountains and there was lots of cloud cover on Saturday nothing really got that dry either. Pair that with the fact that it rained on and off all day and we did not have the best night's sleep as well as the fact that the high was only 70 and the low was in the 40s and it make for a pretty lousy camp out.
The one highlight was that there were wild raspberries growing on the side of the mountain so Charlie and the girls and I picked raspberries on Saturday afternoon and ate them as we were picking. But that does not make up for the fact that about an hour later as we were standing in line for dinner it started pouring rain and the chairs that we had just set up were full of puddles by the time we got our food. Sigh.
When we first arrived, even though we were putting the tent up in the dark, I had hopes that we would have a really good weekend and would want to do this again. Now I'm not so sure. When I was a kid we used to camp every year and I'm not sure how my parents did it. In fact I didn't even really think about how everything magically worked out until I was doing it myself this weekend. I know that my mom hated preparing for those camping trips and I never understood why. I do now. You have to bring everything under the sun just in case you need it, but you probably don't. The things you really needed to bring you forget or they stop working or you know you brought but you can't find. There are things you should have brought but never anticipated that you would need - like a second pair of shoes or in Charlie's case a ground cloth for inside the tent (I know if I had just asked you Mom you would have told me to bring that one).
Once you get home, there is more work to do than before you left. You have to wash all the clothes and the dishes and everything else you used. On weekends like ours you have to wash everything - sleeping bags, pillows, blankets - because it all got wet. Then you have to air everything out and brush everything off and put the tent up again in the front yard to air out and brush off. Ugh. Again, some of this we would not have had to do if it hadn't rained. Luckily it is so hot and dry here that everything dried out rather quickly when we got home and we had everything put away within two hours. Except all the laundry, I'm still doing that, but at least I'm down to just needing to wash the clothes. Everything else is clean.
To sum it up we had a very memorable weekend. Whether we want to try to that again is another question, but I think the girls are game. They had a blast, even when we were playing in the tent in the middle of the day because it was raining yet again. Maybe next time we'll rent a camper with a toilet and a little stove and live the life of luxury.
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