Father’s Day Camping

Lest you think that only Mom gets to enjoy a camping trip on her special day, rest assured that we made it out camping on Father’s Day weekend too. Phoebe couldn’t wait; we went with the Brinkmans, and she loves to spend time with the boys. We reserved the last two sites at Kelly Dahl campground just above Nederland, planning to spend at least part of the time in town. Almost everywhere is under a fire ban (for good reason!), so we knew we’d be hanging out around a lantern instead of a fire in the evenings.

We managed to get the car packed Friday morning, though Dave is always frustrated by how much space we take up. With the Noodle in our future, we’d better get a roof box fairly soon! We brought all the stuff that makes car camping so great—real pillows, for instance—plus Phoebe’s hiking backpack and her Strider bike.

After work on Friday, we stopped at Chipotle for dinner and then drove up to Ned. We beat the Brinkmans, so we got our choice of sites. We took a more wooded one with sloped tent sites. The other site was a long cattycorner away, which meant that we got to hang out a little bit that evening, but not much. We couldn’t walk that far away with kids sleeping in the tent, so Dave and I just sat around the lantern and read. We went to bed fairly early. I slept so well! The temperature was perfect in the mountains, and Phoebe slept all night without needing to crawl into anyone’s sleeping bag. In the morning, Dave cooked eggs and bacon, so we started the day off right.

After breakfast we went on a hike up a trail that led out of the campground. We’d been told there were a couple of old mines on the way, though some bigger kids thought our littler kids would never make it. They made it with aplomb, actually! No one needed to be carried, and there was lots of hand-holding. The best part was that they all went down for a nap afterward…and it rained during naptime. We grownups stayed mostly dry under our Noah’s tarp, chatting and snacking.

In the early evening we drove into Nederland for dinner at Kathmandu and a ride on the carousel. When we got back, the kids got out their bikes, and when that got boring, we went on a short walk around the campground that included several rounds of Ring Around the Rosy.

On Sunday morning, we thought about hiking again, but it got so windy that we just packed up and headed home. It would’ve been a perfect trip, except that Phoebe gets carsick on winding roads, so she threw up just as we got out of the mountains. Poor thing. She felt a lot better after that, and we enjoyed the rest of the weekend at home.