Our Great Camping Adventure!!

Our family embarked on a new kind of adventure this past weekend...camping!!  We have many friends and family who enjoy camping and frequently invite us along, so we finally decided to try it ourselves!  While I wondered how it would all go, especially with the kids, I must say that the weekend surpassed my expectations!  It was great to catch up with many friends as well as Steve's Uncle John and Aunt Sue who went with us and helped us a ton! 

This was our home for the weekend...we rented this from a friend of Uncle John and Aunt Sue!  It was a great way to travel and a great place to stay!

Here is what the kids spent quite a bit of time doing...just playing in the sand!  I wondered what they would do the whole weekend, but soon found that some long-lost friends as well as the great outdoors are a recipe for tons of fun!!  They were always running around doing something!  In this picture the kids are playing with Chloe Taylor, whose family we vacation with at Lake Havasu.

The kids and Steve ventured out to climb the hill behind our campsite.  This was the first of many hikes!  We started calling the kids "hiking machines", as Faith climbed this hill 9-10 times!!  They were both so proud of being able to hike so well!

While it is hard to see, that is Faith and Uncle John up near the top!

There was a group of four kids on the trip who were five years old or almost five.  They all had a great time playing together!! Pictured is Chloe and Faith discussing the results of the boce ball game they just finished!  They, along with the other "nearly five" crew loved playing boce ball!!

Shane riding the quad!  Not to worry...he isn't actually moving!  And somehow he smuggled the paci, which was to stay in the motor home at all times!, out for the ride! He loved the helmet so much as he thought it made him look like Buzz Lightyear!  The only reason he took it off was to eat dinner!

Father and son...they look so great!!  And clearly enjoying themselves!

Faith and Jim Taylor about to take off in the four-seat Razor.  Just before this, I had gone for a ride in the Razor, and Faith was extremely sad she did not get a ride.  Thankfully Jim offered to take her for a ride too!  And she loved it!  As a side note...this razor creates a roller coaster ride in the desert!!  Very fun!

Besides what can be seen in the pictures, we did quite a bit talking with friends (there were 23 of us camping together!!), sitting around the campfire at night, eating really well (thanks to John and Sue!), s'more making (I was introduced to how to make them with a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup!  So good!), and enjoying the desert!  Again, we had a great time!  While I can still smell smoke in my hair after taking two showers and the kids had to undress outside before I would let them into the house when we got home, I think there will be a repeat camping adventure for the Poelstra family!