Camping Trip!

I’m a week behind in posting about our camping trip (oh yeah, and I still haven’t posted about our trip to Branson, have I?? Yikes!). Last weekend, Steve and I took a nice long weekend—Friday through Tuesday—and planned a camping trip. Of course, we happened to choose the hottest weekend of the entire summer…no joke. We originally planned to camp at Greenleaf State Park in Eastern Oklahoma, but decided it would be dangerously hot there, so we toyed with the idea of moving our little vaca north…WAY north. Like “surprise my family in Minnesota” north. However, at midnight on Thursday, I was pretty stressed about driving that far for just a few days, so we ended up on a trek to the Lake of the Ozarks State Park in Missouri. What a beautiful campground! Look at our campsite…right on the lake! Not bad for $9 a night.



See this nice little set up of our chairs with a prime lake view?

Don’t let that fool you. We spent very little time there. I brought 3 books…could hardly even read, it was so hot. We had a heat index of 120. CRAZY. We tried to cool off in the lake, but it was actually quite shallow (no higher than thigh deep, even out to the middle), so the water was pretty toasty (probably at least in the 90’s). We did venture out in the lake with Norman, hoping to cool him down (he sure is a cute little swimmer, minus the “I hate my life” look that he kept giving us for putting him in the water). We were walking in ankle or knee-deep mud. We sure did make memories! Norman was our little trooper.

He got several cold showers under the water spigots. We also took several cold showers ourselves…turned out to be the highlights of our days. Haha. I don’t think either of us has ever sweat so much…but hey, we were camping…you are supposed to be dirty, right?

We (and by “we” I mean Steve) did manage to get a fire going, even with wood that was so wet from the humidity that it was sizzling instead of burning. And our screenhouse came in so handy for keeping out the bugs in that crazy humidity.

Even though the heat was oppressive, both Steve and I agreed that our first camping trip with just the 3 of us was a success. And we were the only tent campers brave (read: insane) enough to stay past Sunday in our campground area. Several other campsites had dates of Monday or Tuesday as their departure dates. However, after we got back from the store on Sunday (ok, I admit it, we went to the Petco in town so all three of us could have some a/c for a bit), the campground was all but deserted. We almost thought they were kicking people out because of the heat. Nope. People were bailing left and right. We actually did leave one day early, too, though. We left Monday morning. Later this fall, we are definitely taking another camping trip and we will be so excited to need a fire to stay warm, and to fight over who gets to have Norman cuddle up to them in the middle of the night for warmth. We now consider ourselves professionals.