The Blanch Herd: Birthday Campout

Since we couldn't have a friend party or a birthday bowling bash this year, we decided it would be fun to go camping (Callie's request). We talked about camping the evening of Callie's birthday, but since the weather was so unseasonably cold that day (when Sam woke up and looked outside at the gray foggy clouds he said, "It looks like a winter day!") we pushed it back till Thursday and changed our venue (from up near Monte Cristo to lower elevation North Fork Park). A fun coincidence was learning that Grandpa and Grandma Blanchard were planning to be camping that same night in anticipation of their upcoming trip to Yellowstone (they wanted to make sure all was working properly with their trailer after being in storage over the winter so they needed a test campout before the real deal). We ended up going together and it was such a fun time! (The kids were constantly saying, "This was way more fun because Grandma and Grandpa came!")

We caravanned to the campground on Thursday afternoon around 4:00 (after Gregg finished working for the day) and found shady sites next to each other in the Corrals Loop of the campground. Since we had each planned separate campouts and just combined them at the last minute, we cooked our own dinners but ate them together in Paul and Kim's site. We had canned beef stew and grilled cheese sandwiches and cherries; they had tinfoil dinners. We visited and explored and wandered around the campground and sat around the fire and had a lovely time. There was most definitely also popcorn, banana boats and s'mores involved post-dinnertime. Cal was intent on seeing stars, so she stayed up till almost 10:00 before it was dark enough to see many (even in our dark sky park! - that's what you get for camping so close to the summer solstice, the days are just so long!) Sam tried hard to last that long, but was just too tired so he went to bed "early" by himself in the trailer; he was out in a minute!

We found some nice shady spots in the Corrals Loop
in North Fork Park (our first time camping there,
even though we hike in the park all the time).

Nature journaling by the campfire.
(That's the fancy sounding title - they were just
happy to find the notebooks and markers grandma
had in the trailer and got busy doodling and drawing
to their hearts' content.)

A handy trail through the trees connected our sites.

Grandpa got busy branding messages
in scraps of wood using his marshmallow
stick.

We even got to use a color pack in
the fire to make colorful flames!
That was a highlight for the kids.

How we always pose for pictures togther.

Friday morning we woke up in our cozy trailer, ate some breakfast (cereal and fruit and hard boiled eggs) and did more exploring around the campground. The kids played wild chicken in the corrals down the road with Grandma while Gregg and I hiked a road we've been wanting to explore for a long time. We ended up at the Environmental Center disc golf course (right where we thought we'd be) and made a loop out of our return by taking the waterfall trail back. It was fun to connect some dots that we had seen on the map but had never seen on foot and to do it as a little date hike was just an added bonus. Around 11:30 we packed up and drove back home. Easy peasy camping squeezy.