Taylor Gang: Camp Richardson

One of my "things to do before the baby comes" is to go camping. I was running out of weekends so I told Matt that this weekend we had to go or it wasn't going to happen. We planned on going by ourselves but found out the Nash family went camping over the weekend too. So we called them to see if we could join them Sunday night. One night of camping is good enough for me right now-it fixes my "itch" to go. We originally planned on staying closer to town but the Nash family was already up at Camp Richardson. We debated because last time we weren't too impressed and we were a little nervous about going that far. But we figured they were already there and the company would be fun.
We packed the night before and Matt pre-cooked the tin foil dinners. I went to Walmart to buy cheap "camping" clothes for Brielle because I really didn't have any and a few miscellaneous items. We had to stay for all of church because I had to teach a lesson in young womens. Needless to say we didn't get up there until around 6:30ish.
The camp site was a huge improvement over the last place we stayed. I also love Sunday night camping because no one is there. It was very quite. I was happy we went.
It took Brielle two seconds before she wanted to play in the dirt and boy did she play. By the time she was done she had dirt EVERYWHERE but she sure did have fun. I knew she would be filthy so I wasn't too worried about it. While she played Matt set up our new tent that his parents gave us for Christmas, and threw on dinner. We had NO idea how fancy our tent was until we set it up. You don't have to zip up the door-it automatically shuts, it has a light that comes with a remote, the windows have some cool roll up thing, and a doggy door.
After dinner we played baseball, roasted marshmallows, popped some popcorn, and got the kiddos ready for bed. My original thought was to have Brielle sleep with us, but then I decided to see how she would do sleeping on the floor by herself. I bundled her up with clothes, blankets and her own sleeping bag. Matt and I layed down with her until she fell asleep.
Once the kids were down, we just hung around the camp fire. We were going to play games but never made it that far. I kept eating smores since they kept calling my name. At one point in time I asked Matt when he planned on moving the food from the truck into the bear box but he didn't seem too interested in doing anything and said he was going to keep it in the truck. I wasn't too thrilled with that answer but didn't do anything about it.
The night grew late, and we had talked about going to bed but no one did. It was about midnight when we had a visitor. We were still sitting around the camp fire when Both Julie and Zac pointed their flashlights toward the bear box and the truck. Much to our surprise we saw a BEAR! At first we all froze because I think we went into shock, we were looking at the bear and he was looking at us and kept walking forward. Then our adrenaline kicked in and realized we needed to make noise and scare it off. Matt, Julie and Zac started to make noise and more closer to it, Matt hit the car alarm as well. I kept quite and headed straight for the tent. I was afraid all the noise would wake Brielle up and she would freak out. Much to my surprise none of the kids woke up, however us parents were WIDE awake at this point. once the bear ran away we searched the area to make sure it was really gone and then there was a mass clean up effort. The truck was cleaned out both the cab and the trunk. The campsite was cleaned up even more. We were shocked how brave the bear was walking right up to our site and how quite it was. We didn't hear a thing. We were a little afraid it was going to come back, Zac put up a parameter of chairs and bikes and toys so if it did come back we would hear it knock something over and wake us up. We weren't really wanting to go to bed at this point but figured it was late enough and we needed to try to go to bed. No one slept very well that night. At first I was afraid the bear would get us but I had Matt say a prayer and I put my trust in the Lord knowing we would be ok. Therefore my lack of sleep was because I got too cold and I always sleep crummy the first night of camping. However Brielle slept great! She is a little wiggle worm so I would check on her and would keep covering her with blankets. Then probably around 5ish she woke up because she wouldn't find her pacifier and I put her in bed with us. At that point I took the blankets we gave her and put them on our bed, finally I was warm and fell asleep for a little while.
Matt got up and made us Breakfast-which was so yummy. We packed up and headed up to Fallen Leaf falls with Julie and the kids while Zac headed back to Reno for work. Julie said the falls were amazing and I was excited to check them out. Last year when we drove up the falls were pretty much dry and there was just a trickle. However this year they were so full, it was amazing. We played around for alittle while and then headed back down to Camp Richardson for some ice cream.
We decided to go to North Tahoe Beach and play for the afternoon. We had lunch and played in the water. It was a really hot day so it was nice to dip in the water and cool off. When we got home we heard on the news that it was the first day it hit 100 degrees. No wonder we were so hot up at Tahoe.

DIRT: