This weekend while everyone else was trick or treating we went camping. The packing started last Wednesday, even though we weren’t leaving until Friday. I used my dining room as a staging area for all of our camping items. Everything was going great until Thursday afternoon when I decided to put up our tent in the living room.

I realize as I type this how ridiculous it sounds, but at the time I thought it was a good idea. I was very worried about the temperature and wanted to see if we could all fit into our big tent. Usually we camp with two tents, but I thought we could stay warmer if we crammed into our big one.

I am sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that the tent did not fit in our living room. So Thursday evening I had this mess in my dining room.

I couldn’t really get the tent back into the bag because there wasn’t enough room, and the kids kept getting in the way….

I didn’t have time to deal with the tent anyway because I had another job calling me from the upstairs.

I am not sure how many loads of clean laundry that is, but it is a king sized bed.

I finally got all the laundry folded and either packed or put away and went to church. The next morning we packed the suburban.

Oh for the person who asked about mountain pies… basically it is two pieces of bread cooked in the pie iron with stuff in the middle. My kids like cheese, pepperoni, and pizza sauce. Here is a picture of the pie irons.

Okay, back to packing, we packed the back…

We put stuff on the roof…

And we even bought a hitch haul to carry more stuff, but don’t worry we didn’t drive with her on the back.

When we were finally packed we headed to the campground. The campground was absolutely beautiful and we had a wonderful time. The jobs at the campground were much more fun than the jobs at the house.

Cooking hot dogs…

Taking walks…

Exploring…

Skipping stones…

I took your advice and didn’t make anyone take a shower while we were gone. It was way too cold in the morning and evening, and who is going to make a kid take a shower in the middle of the day? I think some of the kids wore the same clothes the entire trip, which at first grossed me out, but I now realize it saved me a ton of laundry.

The stuff they did wear was filthy so it is now soaking in oxy clean on my back porch.

At least it was only one cooler full of dirty clothes, not two.

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