Final Four Trip

This past weekend we took our final camping trip for the year and as a family of four. The next time we go on vacation we'll have another kid! This time we went to Parker Dam State Park in Elk County, PA and had such a fun time. Chad and Sheila also came with us and we had one really big camp site right next to the bathroom (of course).

On the road and ready to go. It took about 4 hours to get there. We left around noon on Friday after packing up what felt like the whole house.

We stopped at Burger King for lunch and Chase wore this crown for the rest of the day and most of the next, I had to take it off him while he was sleeping! So Friday evening we got to the campsite and set up our tents and had dinner. We went out to look for elk that evening and saw a bunch of them (too many to count but all cows).

It's so beautiful up there. There seemed to be quite a few noisy people camping that night so we didn't sleep all that great.

Saturday morning we had a really yummy breakfast and kinda just putzed around all morning. Chase's favorite game lately has been hide and seek and I wish we would have kept track of how many times we all played it with him, that and bike rides. We each took him on numerous rides around the campground loop.

Here he is hiding under Sheila's chair. Joanna would try to play along sometimes too but she was mostly concerned with the food :) This of course is my favorite picture of her:

(chomping on venison jerkey)

In the afternoon Ricky took Chase down to the lake and went fishing for an hour while I tried to get Joanna to nap. She finally went to sleep and so did I and we ended up sleeping for 3 hours! Trying to make up from the night before I suppose. We had steaks for dinner that night and then went out a little earlier to go Elk spotting. We saw some more herds of cows and then got a "hot tip" about where we could see a bull so drove down to this little diner and watched this bull elk walk around the back yard of the diner.

Pretty cool, right? It's still kind of early so we didn't hear any bugling this time but it's always neat to see them... they wander in people yard and right into town sometimes. We had decided earlier that we wanted to go out for ice cream Saturday night and noticed people walking out of the diner with cones as we were leaving so after driving around for a little longer we wound up back at the Elk View Diner and had ice cream and coffee and just sat for a couple hours on the porch. Ricky had, what he said was the best apple dumpling ever and the best cup of coffee ever and they had all these hummingbird feeders hanging up that where "swarmed" with hummingbirds! So we sat and watched them for a while, it had started to rain so we weren't all that anxious to head back to camp. I have the worst possible camera to try and take pictures of hummingbirds but their were so many of them and they were chirping and fighting with each other over this one feeder right in front of us.

Good ice cream, good coffee and good friends... what more could you ask for?

See, Ricky really does like camping! :)

It pretty much poured all night and Joanna woke up around midnight because it was raining so loud. So she came onto our air mattress which pushed me right up against the edge of the tent, which made me pretty wet by morning. After taking showers we went out for breakfast in Clearfield, PA and then went to look at the Curwensville Dam. It was not really that exciting but it did help to kill some time while the rain cleared out.

There was a long walkway that we really wanted to go down but it was "guarded" by a no entrance sign so we just let the kids run down a little bit to get some energy out.

And climbing the fence:

By the time we got back to camp it had started clearing up a bit so we decided to go on a little hike. I'm not sure how far we ended up going... Chad had Joanna in the Ergo and Chase walked most of the way himself.

It wasn't too difficult of a hike but I was definitely feeling it. About halfway through we came to a little vista that looked out over the Parker Dam.

The sun even came out for us! Sheila was nice enough to snap a picture of our very sweaty selves :)

So we got back and laid the kids down for naps. Chad and Sheila went out for another bike ride and hike and Ricky laid down with the kids while I relaxed with a magazine in front of the fire (nice!) That evening we had mountain pies (or Hobo pies) for dinner, which where super yummy and then went out elk spotting again. I think we only saw one elk Sunday night but we did stop at one spot and go for another hike. Everyone kind of jumped out of the van and took off leaving me and Joanna without looking back so I decided just to put her on my back in the Ergo instead of yelling for someone to come back (she doesn't do very well hiking on her own). We didn't go for a long hike this time, maybe a little over a mile but I made Ricky snap a picture anyway, cause I thought it was hilarious. 8 months pregnant and hiking with the baby on my back! Yeah!

We didn't see any elk on our little hike but Joanna was trying to "call" them in. It was so funny, she was doing this for about 10 minutes straight, I should have taken video of her calling... hmmm, perhaps that is why we didn't see any elk.

We did see a bunch of deer though. We somehow ended up back at the Elk View diner for another evening of coffee, apple dumplings and ice cream... oh and lots more hummingbirds! There was a man there who recognized Chase because of all the bike trips around the campsite he had taken. He said everyone was talking about the little boy who kept going on bike rides with different people all day long, which of course got quite the laughs from us, I really should have kept track of all the bike rides. By the time we got back to camp it had started raining again so we just went to bed again.

Monday morning Ricky and Chad decided to burn every scrap of firewood that we had and we had a huge fire to sit around for another yummy breakfast. A little baby chipmunk must have thought it smelled yummy too and ran right into our campsite.

He was pretty easy to catch. Actually Joanna caught him by herself once!

There were also some deer walking right through the campsite across from us.

Well we started packing up around 10:00 and were on the road by 11:30am, home at 4:00pm. This is what our little princess did while we were all packing up:

So we had a lot of fun on our last camping trip for the season. We ended up coming home with a new pet, which Ricky says I'm not allowed to talk about but maybe you can guess what it is ;) We're already looking forward to our next trip in the spring.