Labor Day Camping 2017 part 1

I loved waking up to a campsite that we put up in the dark, finding it to be even lovelier than we could have thought :) We packed up Friday with no reservation for Labor Day weekend, hoping to get a spot at Deadwood Resevoir which is about 3 hrs away. We didn't realize it was on fire and closed until about the halfway point where the turn off is and a guy stopped us to tell us it was closed. So, it was dark (9:30 pm) and we had to find a new place to camp. Campgrounds were full but we miraculously found a spot by the river in garden valley - it didn't have a fire pit so we couldn't do a fire but luckily Devin had awesome cooking preparations with a propane stove.










Our best experiences camping are when there is a nearby river. This can be scary with kids but this part of the river was great, just down a little hill from our campsite and tons of rocks for climbing/throwing and kind of barricading the kids from the stronger current out in the middle of the river, which wasn't very deep. If it weren't for the river, we would have been toast. It got up to high 90s and our campsite wasn't shaded at all. On Saturday we drove into the town of Crouch to escape the mid-day heat. There was a cool little farmer's market going on and we walked through their little town museum and antique shop. The kids got to feel a mattress made with horse hair and some baseball uniforms from the early 1900s made out of wool.













Dusty, dusty, dusty! As if Owen cared, this was his paradise. Digging dirt and throwing rocks :) We put dinner in the dutch oven to cook all afternoon and it was amazing. Kind of like tin foil dinners but in the dutch oven instead of foil over a fire.




Thank heavens for Devin doing bedtime duty even while camping. Since it stays light so late and the tent was still pretty warm we knew the only way we were going to get them to sleep was to go for a drive. So we drove to Crouch again to get some ice to refill our cooler and grab some ice cream treats from the grocery store. Thankfully the kids were asleep by the time we got the ice cream so we didn't have to share, ha :) Pin It