Family’s First Camping Trip
22 07 2008We headed out last Saturday for our first family camping trip. The original plan was to join the Seattle Cruiserheads Rimrock trip on Friday night, but I thought it would be better to not have the family’s first camping trip start out with setting up a tent at midnight so we opted for a Saturday morning departure.
We spent most of last week unpacking boxes looking for camping gear and then purchasing some new gear for family camping. We bought a new family tent, king size air mattress, pump, battery powered lantern to replace the ever fragile and dangerous propane one, and some other random do-dads.
After a painful trip to GI Joe’s on Friday night to get last minute stuff, we staged all the gear and went to bed. In the morning, we loaded the 100 series and headed out around 9am. We made a pit stop for a breakfast of champions at McDonald’s (custom McGriddles) then Peet’s for coffee, then hit the highway. We stopped in Yakima for lunch at what turned out to be an Azteca-like mexican restaurant called El Porto or something. From there we hit a couple of stores looking for a fishing permit, but struck out everywhere. The last place I went to in Tampico said “we don’t get permits around here, we just go fishing.”
From there, we hit the forest service road and made our way to Blue Lake. It was a much longer drive than I anticipated. Amanda manned the Delorme Topo on the laptop–which convenitently died just as the road started forking. We spent some time trying to get it to work with the inverter with no luck, so we ran several of the roads eliminating them one at a time. After striking out over and over trying to find the route, we worked some more on getting the laptop to work–which fortunately for us it started working. We finally made our way to Blue Lake. We arrived just after 3:30, just as the cruiserheads were getting here. It was a long day in the car. After a little rest, we got to setting up the new tent
And Thomas went right to work with the dirt.
We had a nice dinner and most of the cruiserheads called it an early night because they had a long day on the trail. I stayed up with Andy for a while and then hit the sack. It got pretty cold at night. Amanda and I froze our asses off, but the kids did great. We kept checking on Thomas thinking he was going to be a popsicle, but he was an inferno all night. The tent worked out well, but we need to upgrade the sleeping warmth technology.
I made a huge breakfast of pancakes, bacon and coffee. We ate and then started breaking camp. The cruiserheads bailed quick as they were going to take the trails to Hwy 12, but we took our time and headed out the way we came in. This time we stopped for a few photo opportunities like this one:
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