The Almost Perfect Camping Trip

We traveled the Mogollon Rim and finally reached our destination of Knoll Lake where we immediately started unloading the camping gear.  But you know how we homeschoolers see a lesson in everything…. 🙂

Explaining how elevation changes can cause a potato chip bag to expand almost to the point of bursting apart.

Camping trips never seem to go completely smooth and this one had a few troubles as well.

Like who would set a 10 pound bag of ice on our loaves of bread – not only squashing them but saturating them with water from melted ice?

Not this boy, I’m sure.

Maybe that’s the reason Wesley flashed us the peace sign because HE was the guilty one!

The girls got right to work, salvaging what bread they could and made us some delicious BLT’s.

Then there was the chair.

Not only did it have this inviting tangled web covering it but then you know who (uh, huh, that boy) sat the saturated bag of bread on the chair where it oozed a yellowish liquid onto the fabric. No one used the chair the few days we were there. Can you blame them? (this is before the yellowish liquid oozed onto the fabric)

Sorry but I don’t think that peace sign is going to take you far, buddy. 🙂

The serenity of the location was so great that after the wall tent was set up (but no bedding put out) and our lunch eaten, several of them were so exhausted that they just collapsed wherever they could find a resting spot.

I’ve heard that smoke follows beauty so Miss Zoe had to move quite far from the campfire to escape it.

But then there was the fishing, crawdad hunting, canoeing and enjoying the outdoors which is so refreshing.

Smoke continued to plague Miss Zoe, my niece and Serenity. All the girls wanted to do was to make themselves a hot turkey melt in the pie irons.

So amidst the haze of black smoke they managed to make their melts.

It had rained so the wood was hard to get started. The younger two kids were trying their best to get a roaring fire going.

But it just wasn’t happening. So the two older girls cooked their sandwich over a smaller smoking fire while the younger two worked on the bigger smoke fire or maybe they were sending smoke signals. I don’t know.

Camping trips weren’t made to be perfect but they are made for time together, mishaps, sticky marshmallows, smoke and a memory in the making.