The fun, yet expensive camping trip

I’ve been planning for the family to take a camping trip for a couple of months. The kids have cheered, the hub has groaned at every mention. We’ve done it in the past (think long past) but he says that was because it was cheap entertainment. Well, it wasn’t cheap entertainment this time. We decided to get the kids sleeping bags this time, they enjoyed those and it proved to be a very good investment because they were warm the first night. I bought a screen tent to put over the picnic table which I now highly recommend because we ate “bee free” and I heard a few less “the bugs are buggin’” from my children. Then of course you figure in all the food, equipment and last minute supplies you realize you need and it all adds up. But, when you pack up the van and take off everyone is ready to have a wonderful time and none of that matters. Hub and I set up the tent and the screen tent, try to start a fire with very wet wood (didn’t work well) and then I go through all the supplies he unpacked from the van. I found the sleeping bags but not the blankets for our bed. Hmmm…after looking a bit frantically I realize I left all the blankets to our bed sitting in the hallway at home. Hubs decided that navigating unknown county roads at 9pm without a detailed map would not be a good idea (something about his aviation background) and we called upon the towels to pull double duty as blankets. The low reached 55 degrees that night making it a L.O.N.G, cold night. Every time the deer hunter neighbor of ours woke me up I had wished I would have taken a sleeping pill to put me out of my cold misery. At last the sun arose and we got in the van and cranked the heat. After breakfast we all packed in the van and drove 20 miles to the nearest town to find a Wal-Mart and bought 2 more sleeping bags. That turned out to be a very good thing because the next night the low reached 43 degrees!

We did have a lot of fun though. For a mere $20 we rented a boat for the entire day/night and the kids went on several gator searching trips. Emily saw many alligators and Jacob argued every time that they were "just" logs. Matthew had a grand time pushing Dad back out into the lake 3 times when he wanted to be pulled in to shore instead. We toured the old grist mill where they still grind corn for cornmeal and occasionally wheat and finished the evening with a big fire and smores. They are already asking when we can go camping again.

But, the most expensive part of the trip…about 30 minutes after getting home I realized I had lost my diamond necklace sometime during the weekend. Yea, that sucks.