Chilly Camping

**pictures for this post will come at some point -- hopefully soon**

This last weekend we went camping! We love camping. Its been our tradition for the last three years to go up to Tuolumne Meadows in the high country of Yosemite National Park during the early fall. The first year we just went up for the day and hiked to the top of Lembert Dome. Last year we camped and hiked out past Soda Springs to the Tuolumne Falls on Saturday and went all the way up to nearly 12,000 feet on Sunday to hike the Gaylor Lakes trail (we were hiking on snow in September!). This year we camped again and did our hiking on more level terrain because of baby in belly. We went out the John Muir trail through Lyell Canyon. It was beautiful – meadows, fairly dense big tree forested areas, huge granite boulders, creeks, streams, rivers, flora, fauna (deer, marmot, etc) … quite lovely.

Now the chilly part – well on Saturday night I cooked us something over the camp stove that tasted kind of like chili, but I call it taco soup – it was great! But the really chilly part was that the low overnight temperature was 22. Twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit! Last year it was 24 and we were quite cold, but this year it was even colder. Mind you, we are tent camping – i.e. tent on tarp on ground. I had us bundled up in four sleeping bags and four blankets and we actually were pretty comfortable. :)

On Sunday we had a great breakfast – my standard camping breakfast of breakfast burritos. Greg loves them and it think its primarily because most of it is cooked in bacon grease!! :) We enjoyed our lovely campsite a bit more and packed up our stuff to head back down the mountains into the valley. We made it to town about a half hour before church, just enough time to use the bathroom, change into church clothes, report to mom & dad that we made it back, and run into Target for a quick shopping trip – we still hadn’t showered, but hey that’s a good excuse to sit in the back of the church and at least I wear a headcovering (veil) at Mass so I didn’t have to worry about my hair!

After Mass we headed down to the church we teach at (about thirty minutes from the church we attend). We ate a quick dinner of sandwiches I had packed and prepared for our class – making sure to tell the teens that we had been camping and that is why we smelled like smoke. Our class went really well and at around 8:45pm we were finally on our way home. Its about 45 minutes back up to our house and it sure did feel nice to jump in a hot shower and some clean clothes!!

A great camping trip though and we are both really looking forward to next year – going camping with a kiddo in tow!