Camping at Gull Lake

Yikes, am I ever behind this week! First, I wanted to post about our camping trip last weekend. A couple people have asked me about it... It was a good trip, with no major mishaps! We only went for one night, as we had another commitment last Friday night. (Usually we head out Friday after Joshua is home from work, and camp for 2 nights.) So, we finished packing up on Saturday morning, picked up breakfast at Tim Horton's and enjoyed the nice drive together. We got to Gull Lake around noon. We quickly set up our tent and inflated the air mattresses. The tent was a little stinky after being packed away for so many months! It was good that it had a few hours to air out before we had to sleep in it!

We changed into swimsuits and headed to the beach. Lunch was chicken fingers, cheeseburgers and onion rings from the concession stand. It was a nice, sunny day, but there was a pretty good breeze coming off the water. It was quite cool! Joshua and I had no interest in the water, but the kids were crazy enough to get in a few times! I waded in once, and although the water wasn't that cold, any wet part of the body exposed to the breeze was freezing! There's a huge playground right on the edge of the water, so the kids had fun playing there. Sara recently figured out how to do the monkey bars and that's all she wants to do. Unfortunately for her, she went about 30 times on Saturday and got huge blisters on the palms of both hands! One of them burst open too. Poor kid! That made the rest of the afternoon a little difficult. Even playing in the sand was painful... Sky spent lots of time in the sand, making roads and hills. He's my little creator, always building something! I didn't take any pictures. The only one I took all weekend is the one you see above. (Relaxing by the fire while supper was cooking over the coals.) Bad mommy!

Our night was also good. No rain and no wind - it suddenly got very calm around supper time. We enjoyed supper, Daddy's Yummy Campfire Meal. Afterwards, we took a walk down to the boat dock to watch people loading their boats back onto their trailers. That's always entertaining! You can tell the novices from the experienced ones right away! Then, it was s'mores over the campfire time, clean up and bedtime! We all slept quite well and neither kid had an accident in their sleeping bag. That's always a fear of mine!

Sunday morning we had muffins for breakfast and packed up our stuff. The wind and some clouds blew in again while we were eating, and briefly splattered a few raindrops on us. The clouds blew away, but the wind stayed. We attempted to spend more time at the beach, but it was extremely windy and cold. The kids played on the playground a bit, we played a family game of tag on the sand, and then decided to find somewhere warm to eat lunch! We had breakfast for lunch at our favourite restaurant in Red Deer. After lunch, we drove around exploring the countryside a bit before heading home. Unpacking the car was so easy because everything was dry and could be put away immediately! Last year, we had so much rain on our camping trips that we were always drying things out before we could put away. It was a treat to not have to do that!

So, our first camping trip was a success! We're looking forward to the next weekend trip out July 17-19!