I'll confess that as we were planning this year's family campout I was hoping that no one would feel stressed or anxious about a repeat of last year's accident. I didn't want to spoil the relaxed atmosphere with every one being nervous. Turns out, the only nervous person was me! I didn't realize that watching Bundle get anywhere near that campfire would make me stiffen with nerves and I'm sure I did a little too much shooing away from the fire pit. Ha ha, joke's on me. And everything was fine.
We did have a really fun camping trip with the fam. We were able to go to the beautiful Unitas this year instead of the ATV campground of last year. We got some rain but never enough to make things difficult. Well, I guess it would have gotten a little tough if we didn't have two families there with campers, and lucky we did.
What made this year special was that we had our first fishing success in the wild with the kids, crawdads not included. Stomper has caught a couple of farm raised trout before but that isn't too hard a task when it seems like the pond has more fish than water in it. We were up on the Mirror Lake Highway at Lost Creek campground and spent some time on the shore of the lake casting and reeling in. Stomper is getting pretty good at casting out, which is nice. But by the shore nothing was really biting. (Stomper will tell you otherwise; he had two horrific snags that he swears were giant fish that got away.) Remind us never to go camping without Troy's brother Rick and his wife Tonja because not only did they provide a camper for us to cook in when it was raining, they also brought along a canoe and let us use it to fish from.
I am a little surprised that we survived putting all five members of our family into a canoe together - those things are tippy! - plus a fishing pole and a net plus a couple of paddles and eventually two wriggling fish without all of us ending up in the lake. It was quite comical - Troy was in back trying to paddle backwards so that the kids who were fishing could troll the line. Steering backwards is no easy feat, I'll tell ya. Add two ecstatic children plus a very wiggly toddler who was supposed to be sitting in-between the knees of her mother in front while the mother was trying to net fish and remove hooks as well as control the toddler...well, it got kind of funny. But we survived. And those little lake trout are tasty! It is so cool to catch a fish, clean it up, throw it in some tin foil with butter and salt and be eating it like 20 minutes later. The kids devoured theirs and loved every bite.
I am also happy to report some very pleasant sleeping conditions - we stayed warm and toasty and I don't think we had even one puker in the whole family. Usually there's at least one.
My favorite part of the trip just had to be Tyrell. He is our nephew - the third of Rick's three sons. He just graduated from high school and was cool enough to join us on our trip. He's funny and sweet and there were three little girls in our family who just fell in love with him..Probably because he would go down to the stream with them and either entertain them by throwing giant rocks into the deep spot creating tremendous splashes or by just sitting on a rock and letting the girls climb all over him. I believe he even participated in a game or two of pretend, though I'm not sure what character he was assigned to play or what his name might have been. Troy and I considered kidnapping him and keeping him at our house as further entertainer and babysitter of our kids, but I bet he might not be as sweet all the time then. We'll just have to take advantage of him on our annual trips.
So thanks to all the Preslars who pitched in on rockin' dutch oven dinners with alarming calorie counts, who brought fun projects to keep kids entertained, who came together to enjoy the thoroughly pleasant break from the city heat. It was a great trip and I hope we repeat it every year.
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