First Camping Trip (and Dan's 30th)

The weekend before my birthday I had a camping trip up at Hermit Park, just a few miles above Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. It was just the sort of relaxing excursion I needed to celebrate my 30th birthday. I brought a bunch of friends up to help celebrate, and we had a great time. It was also Alex's first camping trip.

Before we left, Alex took a break to play in the sprinklers:


Another fun thing we discovered is that the inflatable raft is lots of fun on the grass in the backyard!

Now, on to the camping trip...

Mother nature's son

We arrived on Friday afternoon just in time for a humongous Rocky Mountain thunder storm.

Uncle Eric and Dan struggle in the rain with the 2-room mega tent while Ali and Dana relax under the canopies that take 1 person 5 minutes to set up

On Friday night it was just Ali & Eric and Mike and Nicole who braved the elements to join us.

Mike and Nicole relax on the inflatable couch in the "kitchen". (Complete with Dan's now famous kitchen sink)

Alex was intrigued with Ali and Eric's rolling house.

Ali and Eric catch up with Kim (a Benicia transplant just like us!) and Tom, who just moved to Colorado to teach/research at CSU. Go Rams! Kim came up for the afternoon despite being 6 months pregnant!

During a resupply trip into Estes Park, Ali and Alex catch up on their phones.

Mandy can't believe the bullshit that Tyr is dishing out, but Dan is eating it up.

Saturday night: Mandy is going to stoke that fire if it kills her... Tyr was kind enough to bring along his growing collection of digeredoos, harmonicas, mouth harps, and other musical oddities, which kept us all entertained well into the night, until we were visited by the very friendly park rangers sometime around 12am, who respectfully asked us to shut the hell up.

Last weekend we thought Alex might be old enough for his own bed. So we tried putting the guest bed on the floor, and letting Alex sleep in it. He fell out twice during the night (no injuries, and he was too sleepy to even really notice), so we reverted to the crib for the time being.