Family Camp

We spent this weekend camping at the McDowel Nature Preserve near Lake Wiley in Charlotte, NC. We had a lot of fun. This was going to be a test run for our trip to Disney in December since we're planning on staying at their campgrounds. We took Sophie's play pen because I don't trust her to stay in the tent, which was a totally reasonable concern given that she figured out how to squirm her way out of the tent within 15 minutes of setting up. =P

Saturday morning, just waking up.

We got in late Friday, so it was mostly set-up and crash that night. Saturday morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we went hiking. The nature preserve had 9 trails that we could explore. Many of them were interconnected. We sampled three of them.

Nifty tree we saw that was growing horizontally.

Saturday afternoon, the boys participated in a fort building activity run by the Nature Center attached to the preserve for our scout pack. That was a lot of fun. There were about 25 kids at the event. They broke into 6 groups and each group was supposed to attempt to build a structure that would hold everyone in their group and would be moderately rainproof.

Ty's Group:

Luke's Group:
Logan's Group:
Sophie:

Logan's group actually won the competition. Luke ended up breaking off from his group because of creative disagreements with his leader, and he made his own fort. Sadly the picture I got of him in his finished fort did not save properly to my phone--this is not the first time my phone has done this, and it is a problem. >_< Sophie fell asleep on the hike up to where the fort building activity took place. One of the other guys there let her borrow his umbrella because it was sprinkling rain off and on. She was pretty startled when she woke up. Throughout the whole weekend, she had a ton of fun playing in the dirt and taste-testing all kinds of sticks, rocks, leaves, etc. After the fort building, we went back to the Nature Center, and everyone got to hold/pet a corn snake if they wanted to. Logan and Sophie both held the snake. I really wish I had gotten pictures of this.

Saturday night it poured the rain.This was a bad thing because it turns out our tent had some pretty bad leaks (along with a few other problems we identified Friday when we put the tent up). This was a good thing because I'm glad we found this out now, since we were fairly close to family, rather than December during our trip to Florida. We ended up packing up a lot of our stuff and spent the night at Shaun's parents' house, since they lived nearby. We came back Sunday morning to about 2 inches of standing water in the bottom of our tent. Although I was sad we weren't able to spend that last night there, I was glad we had an alternative to not being so thoroughly soaked. Now we also know we need to do some repairs to our tent (or maybe even replacing it since there are some other hardware issues with it as well) before December.