The Great Outdoors and Something Green!

Many things green, actually.

Since we spent all summer worrying about getting a job and a place to live, we neglected all of our camping gear in the dusty, spider-y cellar.  Now that we no longer have a dusty, spider-y cellar and do have a place to live, we decided to take the camp gear out of the closet in the laundry room and went off in search of something green.

I have to tell you that we picked the coldest day in October to do it.  It was raining for the first time all month as we were gathering the stuff and preparing to leave.  Oh, and the power was out.  I kept asking/telling Ben that we must be crazy.  I'm beginning to think that that's the point of being young and  married, though.  At least, in my case, it's been a time for doing all of those crazy, borderline irresponsible (but only borderline.  There is a child involved here, you know) things that I didn't do in college.

But where was I?  Oh yes - October.  The coldest day in October.  So far.  (I know some of you are rolling your eyes, thinking 'well of course it was the coldest day, Caitlin.  That's what happens in the Fall.  The days get colder.'  Yeah, well, it warmed up again afterward.  This was a special dip in temperature, just for our camping  trip.)  Just to add to the drama of this story, I might add that it was not raining, but snowing as we headed out.  When it stopped, however, and the sun came out, it seemed like everything was going to be honky dory, just like the National Weather Service promised.

Would it be going too far to say that I was completely enamored by our campsite?  OK, not by the site itself.  There was a barbed wire fence just behind it and it was five minutes from a Walmart, which drove Ben just a little crazy.  But there were trees!  Big, tall ones with needles and pine cones.  It was green, I tell you - beautiful, beautiful green!  I raved on and on about it while we started to set up camp.

I tried to help Ben with the tent and such.  I laid a blanket on the ground for Thunder and she seemed content with that, but when I turned around to look at her, she had made her way to the edge of the blanket and had a little hand at her mouth.  I found not one, but three little marble-sized rocks in there.  What the fascination with little rocks is, I don't know, but from everywhere I thought of to put her, she found her way to those little rocks.  So in the end, I took pictures and kept her out of trouble while Ben did all of the work setting up.

We had a marvelous evening together.  It was our first time camping by ourselves since Thunder was born.  Wrapped in two pairs of pajamas, a blanket, and her Peruvian chullo (hat), she seemed pretty comfortable.

  

We did pretty well through the night, with her between us, but we woke up to an icy, frosty world.  We made the mistake of leaving our water out on the picnic table, where it froze solid in the bottle.  The water in the spigot by the bathrooms was also frozen in the pipes.

Since we couldn't very well make breakfast without water, we decided to take a look at the lake.  The all-knowing internet had promised us that there would be a plethora of beautiful hiking trails, but when we had arrived the night before, the ranger informed us that there were none.  At best, he told us, we could walk around the lake, so that's what we did.  In some ways, I think that that was the best part of the whole adventure.

I couldn't get enough of watching that mist rise off the still water as the sun was coming up.

Ben says that this picture looks like an album cover.  I thought it was kind of a neat, dramatic shot.

After we froze our way through breakfast, we decided that one night was enough.  I have decided that October is my favorite month out of the year, but as far as camping goes, I think I prefer June, July and August.