Summer Camp Out 2016

This summer we chose to go camping at our camp for our big planned camping weekend with uncle Kevin. The weekend before we built a second tent deck. We still needed to screw down 7 boards because we had run out of screws. we did that and cut down some of the trees that were knocked down by the creation of the road in. It struck me as I walked around this time how big this flat area at the end of the road really is. There is plenty of room here for quite a large cabin and a grassy area if we ever wanted to do that. 

We needed to cut back some of the trees because they leaned over the deck where our tall tent would need to go

. 

Here is a picture with the tent deck complete with tent. the left side of this tent is facing the hill that goes down to the brook. Behind the right side is where we had to cut back the brush. The tree you see in the right foreground had some low hanging branches that needed to be cut back. Kevin stood on the wooden chair set to reach them with the chain saw. That made me a bit nervous. 

Doing all that work made us hot so we decided to explore the brook a bit. Kevin started moving some rocks to make it so we could cross the brook without getting our feet wet. Well, we like to move rocks in our brook so we moved a whole bunch. 

You can easily cross now without getting your feet wet. It does not keep the water in but just to the right of the rock it comes up to my knees so Tonia likes to swim in the hole we made. We found nice large flat rocks and started carefully dropping them in front of each other unsuspectingly and soaking one another with the resulting wave. 

It was a nice warm weekend and we wanted to go out to the reservoir for a little swim. Just as we were getting out and pumping up tubes for a little float a man from the electric company who owns the reservoir informed us that we could not swim or float on our floats there.  The difference between a Kayak which apparently is allowed and a tube we do not know. So we went back to the brook and played in our water. 

Tonia's friends Gavin and Grayson came to camp for a day with their mother Courtney. 

They enjoyed playing in the rocks and dirt. Gavin was a complete mess when he went home. they stayed for lunch and dinner. 

I am very sad to report that we were having so much fun that I did not get any pictures of Sara and Kevin. Sara was only there for Friday night and Saturday morning. 

               

Here is the first tent deck we built with Kevin's tent and the tent for Roxy next to it. Roxy moved around a lot at night and each morning we found her curled up in her tent with the tent upside down and wrapped around her. Silly Roxy. Roxy went in the tent easily I just told her to kennel and she went right in. 

     

Here is what the camp looks like from the road in. That tent you see has the picnic table inside. The screens were no match for Flymageddon 2016 though. Wow were there so many many many flies. We need to research a way to repel the millions of flies that descended on our camp! we ended up just removing the screens because they were not helping at all. 

The new grill or new used grill came in very handy this weekend and is a great addition to the camp. Thank you to Charles coworker Al who provided that and the white chairs for our camp. 

                                   

It was much easier to make our morning coffee on the side burner. We also tried to finish the walls in the outhouse but the generator was having difficulty starting so Charles brought the generator home so he could clean the carburetor. The only thing left to do is perhaps make one more shelf in the storage shed and to make the two walls on the inside of the outhouse. I also need to bring up some mothballs to keep the insects out of our gear. I hate the smell of mothballs but I think it will be necessary. 

Also new this trip was using the Dutch oven and stand. it was a bit difficult at first but we made a really good potatoes and ham gratin in it the first night. Charles made a super huge fire so it took a lot of time to burn down to usable coals. Note to self, 2 pallets in a small fire ring will crack the big rocks. my nice big rock at the front of our fire pit is now a medium size rock with many smaller rocks around it. I am a bit sad about that.