camping

2 – 11, 3 – 4, 4 – 232

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I haven’t had a chance to update lately.  Of course a lot has happened, we celebrated another month with Evie, our anniversary, and of course, the birth of our nation.

For our part, we went camping for a 4 day weekend.  The camping went about as well as could be expected.  We were a little nervous since we have 2 more camping trips coming up this summer.  It rained once when we first got there and our tent leaked, but there was some time before we went to bed and it dried a little bit.  The rest of the time, the weather was great.  The bugs weren’t too bad and the campsite was decent.  We mostly avoided the sun, although I did have two funny red knees from where I sat in the sun talking for too long and got burned between where my shorts ended and my legs bent down at the knee.  Evie slept surprisingly well, including sleeping right through an impromptu fireworks display right outside our tent that kept Sara and I awake. 

In general, Evie loved camping.  She enjoyed being outside, she enjoyed the swimming and she enjoyed all of the people, but most of all she enjoyed the walking.  She is not walking on her own yet, but she moves quite well when she has something to hold on to.  When we were camping there was an endless loop of lawn chairs, picnic tables, outstretched hands, etc. for her to walk and walk and walk around, from sun up to sun down.  She probably improved her walking skills more in 3 days than in the previous 2 weeks.

The only bad thing that happened was that Evie got sick.  She had an elevated temperature (the doctor insists it wasn’t high enough to call it a fever) and she would periodically throw up.  But when she wasn’t doing that, she was in a pretty good mood so it was hard to know what to do about it exactly.  Actually, the one who got the worst of it was Anna who took a stream of vomit full in the mouth!  Yes, you read that right.

After we got home, the first night was pretty rough as Evie tried to re-adjust to things around here.  That was just the warm up though for the next day.  Sara caught whatever Evie had and got as sick as I’ve ever seen anybody.  She literally could not keep down a sip of water.  In addition Evie was still throwing up, so it was somewhat disastrous around here.  So far I have not gotten sick.  My stomach felt a little uneasy here and there, but I’m hoping it was just paranoia from being around sick people.  We seem to be through the worst of it (assuming I don’t get sick) so perhaps they will not have to paint a big skull and crossbones on the front of our house and quarantine us as a plague house.

Although, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, there were a few silver linings.  For example, Sara lost 7 pounds in about 10 hours!  She doesn’t recommend it as a weight loss program.

Weekend Update

/ Shane / 3 Comments

We had a great weekend camping!  The weather was perfect, sunny and about 80 during the day (so not too hot) and cool at night but not cold.  Unfortunately we forgot our pillows, but other than that it was good.  Everybody made it except for Sara’s brother and everybody had a good time!  The campground was nice, the beach was nice, what more can I say?  We played games, including many rounds of backyard golf. 

But of course, it wouldn’t be a camping trip without something weird befalling us.  So Sara’s sister Anna just finished going to the bathroom when her keys fell out of her back pocket followed immediately by the automatic toilet flushing!!  She put her hand up there and tried to grab them but they were gone!  The ranger said that there was no trap or anything, so the keys were just gone forever.  They had to drive 2 hours to Grand Rapids and 2 hours back to get an extra set of car keys.  So if you’re ever swimming in lake Michigan and you find a set of keys…

Another weird thing that happened is this lady came into our campsite and started yelling at us for “offering her kids tomatoes.”  I mean she was really pissed!  Now, it’s true that my dad had a huge basket of tomatoes from his garden that he was trying to get rid of that he set by the road in case anybody wanted some, but nobody remembers offering any to any kids.  But even if we did!  This lady kept saying, “You don’t talk to kids when there are no adults around!  What’s wrong with you?”  But if she was so concerned with it, why is she letting her kids run around the campsite with no adult supervision?  She made it sound so devious and illicit…”You were offering my kids TOMATOES!”  Yeah, that’s what all the child molesters use to lure in the little kids! 🙂  And when we said we hadn’t offered any to any kids she said, “Well both of my kids said you did.” as if we were lying about it!  What do you think your kids are going to say when you ask them where they stole tomatoes from?  Why would they be more trustworthy than NINE GROWNUPS!  I think there has to be something wrong with you to get so bent out of shape about tomatoes.

So the final funny thing that happened was that there was this MONSTEROUS sand dune that we encountered a few times.  We took pictures, but the pictures couldn’t possibly do it justice.  It was so steep at the top it was like a wall; straight up and down.  It was just amazing.  It was so much fun to run down that you couldn’t help but laugh like a loon even as you were busting out all your teeth on a tree.  Right about when you hit 70 mph you realize “this is going to end badly” and the rest of the time is spent just trying to get your next foot out in front of you.  So my brother missed the first trip there so I had to go with him the next day.  Walking (actually crawling, literally, on our hands and knees because it was so steep) up the hill nearly killed me!!  It was so much worse than I could ever have imagined.  So anyway, after going to the beach, we walked back and I went down the hill first so I could take pictures of him coming down.  So he really gets going, obviously a little too fast, because he just does a perfect face plant right into the sand.  I thought he died, so I tried to get a picture of it, but then the most amazing thing happened!  For a split second the shutter was closed so I didn’t see it exactly, but the next thing I see is him running straight at me!  Aparently his momentum was great enough that his feet just flipped over his head and landed back on the ground and he just kept going!  When he got to the bottom you couldn’t even see his face, it was just a solid mass of sand with eyes blinking out.  He couldn’t even swallow because all the sand in his mouth dryed it out.  It was HIL ARIOUS!

what a weekend!

/ Shane / 2 Comments

So we went up for the reunion this weekend.  Friday we drove to Janesville and stayed with my Aunt Lois.  It took us about 3 hours to get there which wasn’t bad AT ALL, especially considering there was a semi lodged under an overpass on the Kennedy.  Saturday morning we left early and got up there around noon, just in time for lunch.  Our hummus did not go over very well…Northern Wisconsoners are not inclined to try out new-fangled middle easter dips.  Then, when I went to get it later so we could eat it I found out someone threw it away!  I had a really good time all day.  All of my Aunt’s and Uncles were there except Uncle John, but his daughter Audrey flew in from CO so she was his representative.  Sara didn’t have that great of a time.  Sara likes to be entertained constantly, but I’m happy just sitting and talking to everybody.  The only thing that put a damper on everything was the blazing hot heat and humidity.  That wasn’t so bad in the shade though.

Now here’s where things get dicey…

So people were saying it was supposed to rain, but when we went to bed there was not a cloud in the sky.  Still, I decided that I better empty my pockets and put my phone, etc. in the car so in case it did rain it didn’t get wet.  I also rolled the windows all the way up in case it rained.  Sara moved her puse into the front seat as well.  Then we got into a fight because Sara insisted that we needed to lock the car doors since her purse was in there and I said that we didn’t need to because we were hours from anywhere in a big field surrounded by hundreds of my relatives (216 by official count).  Finally Sara locked the doors in a huff.  So we got into the tent and Sara realized her pajamas were in the car.  So I went out to get them and that’s when we realized both of our sets of keys were now locked in the car!  So I went back down to where everybody was and Rusty (the guy who owns the place) got us a wire hanger.  I gave a feeble attempt to open the door but I realized it would be much easier when it was light out, so I went to bed and Sara slept in her clothes.

About 4:00 it started to rain a little bit so we zipped up our windows in our tent.  That’s when all hell broke loose.  Some sort of rogue Wisconsin hurricane blew through and tried to rip our tent to shreds.  There was so much thunder and lightening that there wasn’t a second when the sky was dark.  Even with the tent zipped up and our eyes closed, we could still see some of the bolts!!  The wind was blowing so hard that the tent walls on our 6 man tent would almost touch us in the middle of the tent.  Our tent did an AMAZING job of holding together and keeping most of the rain out, but with the wind blowing that hard and the rain coming in vertical, the wind would lift the rain fly up and the rain would come in the mesh sides.  I quickly got dressed (Sara was sleeping in her clothes since her pjs were locked in the car)(with our umbrellas and some extra clothes) and we got ready to run for it.  I honestly thought it was a tornado and our lives were in danger.

We decided to wait it out some and eventually it quieted down a little bit.  We were shivering in the middle of the tent huddled under the sheet to keep it from raining on our faces.  To be honest though, all in all, it really wasn’t that bad.  We had very little stuff with us since we were only staying 1 night, so we had a couple of feet of buffer space on all sides of us, plus we were on an air mattress so we were off the puddles on the ground.  We stayed pretty dry, all things considered.  The most wet I got was when I went to slap my ball cap on and it was like dumping a cup of water on my head!  There was a huge lake of water in the tent, but nothing was resting in it.

So finally the next morning we woke up and then of course had to deal with the locked car.  Also it was raining pretty good.  We tried for an hour and a half and couldn’t get in with the hanger, so finally we had to call the police and get them to come out and do it.  They were super nice (the posed for pictures, including one of my Grandma up against the car like she was getting arrested) and popped it open in roughly 10 seconds.  They were really a bright spot in the whole thing.

So anyway, everything ended up working out pretty well, other than it raining the whole time we took our tent down so everything’s pretty wet.  We are trying to dry it on the balcony now, but we can’t really put the tent up or anything, so I don’t know how well that’s going to work.

Okay, that’s all.