May camping

I have somewhere around five sewing or house projects right now that are almost done, so watch out for a torrent of upcoming blogging.  You've been warned! In the meantime my family and I took a quick getaway in Little Red this weekend. We drove out to Blue Licks Battlefield State Park, which is between Lexington and Cincinnati. We drove through some gorgeous horse farm country and charming Paris, Kentucky. (Says Dorothy, "Do they have an Eiffel Tower?"  Excellent question, but seems not.)

The campsite was damp but pretty. This campground had two features we really liked. First, the playground is centrally located and visible from almost every campsite, so frisky five-year-olds can run and play without waiting for the slow-poke grown-ups to catch up. Second, the heads to several trails are located right by or in the campground so families like ours don't have to schlep children by car or long and winding road just to start a family hike through the woods.

We realized just a bit too late that the park had a Pioneer Museum, which would have been so fun to visit since we only last week finished reading the Little House on the Prairie series. We did get to check out a trail, the battlefield and monument, and we'd just driven down to the boat dock to explore the creek when we ran into a handful of half-naked teenagers covered from head to toe in mud and decided maybe we should go back to the campsite instead. At first I thought they were actually completely naked teenagers covered in mud and memories of our adventures in Mercer County ran through my head, but at second glance there did seem to be bikinis and trunks somewhere under all the muck. I have no idea what they were up to, but Dorothy only commented that they sure could use a shower (yup!) and rear-facing Worth didn't see them at all. I heard the girls in the campground shower later talking about fall classes (anatomy! advanced chemistry!) and I'm sure they were actually, ahem, very nice girls. There may or may not have ever been muddy bikini-wearing in my past.  I'm not saying. I definitely didn't take advanced chemistry.

Back at camp we had dinner and a campfire. It was damp but not raining and Rob had a rough time getting the fire started. We'd almost given up on the campfire cooking to use our little red camper microwave instead (we're talking about warming pre-cooked chicken sausages and foil packets of potatoes I'd pre-roasted here, not putting a whole pig on a spit or anything) when the fire finally took off quite zippily. We'd just begun to nosh on our smoky hot food when it did actually start raining hard and we fled for the comfort of our tiny camper. We've never been so glad to have graduated from tent-camping as this trip. It rained the rest of the time but we were cozy inside with our art supplies, Rob's newspaper, my camper journal (above), matching pirate pajamas for the small set (below) and the pleasant sound of rain on our roof.

We headed home first thing this morning since hiking in the rain with children isn't really our thing. The trip was short but sweet!