Our cross-country adventure began on Friday, June 15th. I have been promising, for many years now, to spend a summer in New York, with my family. Finally, we decided to make it happen instead of waiting for things to fall into place (let's face it, we could have been waiting indefinitely). There were, however, a few stipulations to the trip: 1. Two kids AND a dog would be joining me. 2. We had to drive a little slower and see some sights. 3. My mom had to fly out to join me.
With that, and my new(ish) car our journey began.
JUNE 15TH - JUNE 17TH - FLAMING GORGE
Our adventure began at Flaming Gorge (even Patrick joined us for this one). We camped at Lucerne Valley and we loved the setting. It was gorgeous. Driving into the campground the road swoops through some intriguing rock formations, it then curves around and flows down into a flat grassy peninsula. We set up our tents on our little RV lot, C5. Our lot had four little trees, a fire pit, a cooking table, a picnic table and a cement slab. It was party camping, not to be confused with remote camping (by remote, I mean far from other humans... I am not talking about the kind of camping where you drive a mini house to a campsite and use your REMOTE to watch your favorite TV shows). Anyway, we camped for two nights and only then did we realize that CAMPING IS... exciting, frustrating, difficult, fun, busy, dirty, sometimes REALLY windy (usually when you are trying to set up camp), nourishing and sticky (sticky from marshmallows but also sticky in that it requires many little sticks to get your fire going in a wind storm). Epiphany: longer trip puts a gap between set-up and tear-down giving you the illusion of ease.
So, lets talk about what a two day camping trip means, Erica-style that is. It starts with about four hours in the car then after an evening of set up, cooking, cleaning, and marshmallow roasting, after which everyone can finally crawl into bed. Don't worry that no one will sleep well, or enough, because of course, the neighbors will get up at 4:30am, the wind will blow all night, and the temperature will be too cold for the sleeping bags to work. But, the BEST part is that Erica will rent a boat at a Marina 30 minutes away and EVERYONE will have to be there at 7:00AM! Welcome to camping!
Even with the grumpy morning, boating was a a lot of fun. The boat was a patio-boat, of course, because, much to Joey's dismay, Erica likes to explore "put-put style", instead of "vroom, vroom". We had an amazing 5 hours of fun in the sun! Then it was time for driving, eating, cooking, eating, cleaning, eating, showering, eating, sleeping, eating ending with:
packing
Packing
PACKING
and then, DRIVING!
Here are some of our fun pictures from Flaming Gorge:
June 18th - Cheyenne, Windcave National Park, Rapid City
June 19th - Mount Rushmore and Badlands National Park
June 20th - Sioux City
June 21st - Minominee, Michigan
June 22nd and 23rd - Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island, Michigan
June 24th and June 25th - Niagara Falls, Canada and New York
June 26th - My Hometown
