Camping 101

Shannon already did a good summary of this weekend's festivities. I'll expand upon the crazy 20'somethings that were camped next to us. We had a fun time camping at Cedar Hill State Park, and thankfully Ben did really good! (Well, except those two times he ran in the street!) That kid is going to give me a heart attack! John got a great fire going and we had foil dinners for dinner. Kelli got all creative with salmon in theirs so I think we'll do some experimenting with foil dinners!

The kids were having so much fun playing together they didn't want to go to sleep! After smores and a lot of chatting we put most of the kids to bed but we had to let Ben cry it out. Can't blame the kid, though, it was pretty warm in our tent. The people camping next to us were as bad as we expected with a ton of noise and a radio blaring rap music the entire evening. We all ended up going to sleep around 11:30 and most of the kids were asleep around them as well. It took me forever to go to sleep because the ground was so hard because we didn't have room in our car from the mattresses Ginny let us borrow!

John can correct this info for accuracy since I was half asleep the whole time, but at about 1:30 I woke up and John wasn't in the tent. I looked out of the tent and he was walking around keeping his eye on some things outside. Apparently there had been an altercation between another camper and the people next to us which caused the Park Ranger to bring in the Cedar Hill police. John was keeping an eye on the situation and when I woke up the officer was writing them all citations, though he did threaten to take them to jail. They had thrown some picnic tables into the lake and possibly even a person! They each got 3 citations and the police waited there till they packed up all of their stuff and were then thrown out of the park. Now, even though the officers were there, it didn't prevent them from exiting the park in a loud and obnoxious manner, cursing, laughing, and just plain being stupid. Needless to say none of us really got back to sleep. Ben was awake most of this time and only slept till about 6:30.

When we all got up in the morning we compared notes on what had happened and were grateful they got thrown out! We had a great pancake breakfast then decided to pack up early because the kids were all so tired! I don't know about the rest of them, but Ben took a 3-hour nap this afternoon, which he REALLY needed!

Even though we didn't get much sleep we still had a great time and will possibly go camping again later this year when the weather starts to cool off! Here are some pictures of our trip and I'll post a couple of select favorites on my photo blog.