Camping at Alturus Lake

We spent a few days last week up at Alturus Lake with our friends the Jenkins family.  We arrived Friday evening and got to work setting up camp while the kids scampered about.  The kids ran about, climbed over logs, created their own games, and helped gather and cut firewood.

We ate so well on this camping trip!  Candice and I are both planners so we had our menu planned so that almost everything was prepared before we left so that while there we just cooked.  I'm not sure that we washed more than 5 dishes in the 3 days that we were there.  Camping burritos, dutch oven chicken and cobbler, fruit pies, roasted hot dogs, it was great!  And of course pancakes, pancakes are best when camping.

The lake water was COLD!  I haven't been to Alturus in nearly 20 years, but I remembered very clearly just how cold the water was.  That's okay, the kids enjoyed fishing and playing the sand.  Karina helped Lily finally figure out casting and she ended up doing really well, getting 20 foot casts which is pretty good for a 4-year-old.

Charlotte got her first fishing pole for this trip and can't quite cast yet, but sure does like reeling it in.

See that blue plastic fish on the end of her pole?  That acts as a weight for them to practice casting.  Well, one time when Candice cast for her it went flying into the water...off of the line.  So Candice and I went into the freezing water, chest deep, to retrieve the blue plastic fish.

Back at the cam sites the kids climbed all over the logs.  I'm amazed at just how much time they spent doing this without getting bored.  Charlotte wasn't overly confident walking on the logs, so she crawled along.

Lily likes to follow Karina around.

I'm pretty impressed with her balance.

King of the stump!

Bruce and Lily playing with a lighter...maybe not our best parenting moment.

 No camping trip is complete without s'mores (and a nice poke to the eye while playing with sticks)

 Good stuff!

We had a few visitors to our camp site.  This deer spent a while running around the camp ground.

There was also this skinny little black fox that roamed around one morning.

We had a lot of squirrels popping in and out of holes all around our site.

Gideon did very well.  Camping with a 2 month old is pretty easy because he mostly ate and slept.  We made sure to bring our bouncy chair so that we had a place for him to rest so that he didn't have to be held all day long and it was great to have.  Even with a hat and keeping him in the shade he still managed to get a little sun burnt on his face.

Charlotte still loves her brother!