Our vacation got off to a bad start.

When we left our house the car had a little trouble starting, but I promptly forgot about it. After all, Sara had been driving the car just that morning and she hadn’t had any trouble. Unfortunately though, it did mean something after all and after stopping at a highway oasis to use the bathroom, the car wouldn’t start again. They didn’t have any jumper cables inside and they told me to call the highway patrol for a jump. While waiting for them to show up, I didn’t have anything to do except try and eventually it started. It actually worked out pretty good. We called a relative to find a repair shop further up the road and we were in an out in less than an hour. They said the battery was “older than dirt” and they were surprised I hadn’t had trouble before this. They even fixed my headlight while they were at it. It was probably more convenient than if it would have happened while at home.

So we got to the campsite a little later than expected, but not too much worse for the wear. It was kind of a weird place. First off, it was completely flat with no trees whatsoever. Standing on our campsite we could see all the other campsites, minus those blocked by all the big honking motor homes (which was like all of them). Second off, the camp store had the largest selection of booze I have ever seen outside of an actual liquor store. I mean, it’s one thing to allow drinking in your camp and quite another to stock it 4 deep on the shelves. Third, the place was packed and yet it was…empty. Other than the two tent campers next to us, the entire campsite was silent after nightfall. From every motor home came the flicker of T.V. I just can’t quite fathom why people would even bother going camping if it’s going to be like that. It also rained a little, but it didn’t really effect much; we had time in the morning to let the sun dry everything out before we left.

On Saturday we went to the actual reunion. It was great, as usual. The food was good (especially Grandma’s rhubarb crisp!), it was fun to visit with family, we ended up with some embroidered towels from the raffle and Evie enjoyed the horse drawn wagon rides (she took a few). The weather was very odd. Every 10 minutes it would switch between sunny and hot and rainy and cold as if someone was flipping a switch. Every time it got sunny I was itching to put up the tent, but Sara wouldn’t let me. Her brilliant plan worked to perfection because by the time we finally put up the tent, we missed the rain entirely.

The next day we took our usual yearly trip to the Waupaca Camping Park. This place is really great; they have a lot of cabins and nice tent sites, they are very clean, they have a nice playground and they have a heated pool. The campsites are laid out nicely with lots of trees, etc. We did some hiking, the highlight of which was seeing an enormous turtle, at least two feet long counting the tail, sunning on a rock. We went to a very strange place named the Animal Haven Zoo. It wasn’t really a zoo so much as a series of connected pens. You never knew what you were going to find, one minute you’d be feeding goats, the next minute you’d be checking out some lions. It was way better than I was expecting and I would definitely recommend it. Buy the animal food too, it is well worth $1. They also had a surprisingly nice gift shop.

One day while running around the campsite, Evie fell down and skinned her knee and smashed her face on the pavement. We felt really bad, especially knowing that she was going to have a mark on her cheek in all of her birthday pictures. She wasn’t too concerned though, she was more upset about having to put on a band-aid than anything. Other than that we did all the regular camping stuff; smores, pudgie pies, hot dogs and brats, and more rain. It actually rained 5 out of 7 days that we camped, but the only day it was really a problem was on Thursday when we were getting ready to leave. We were already getting puddles in our tent and everything was soaked by the time we got it into the car. By the time we were ready to go, I was really ready to be home. Evie had a great time and really was an angel. She even slept well!

All in all a very nice vacation!