Camping with Fireworks

After a week of preparing...we packed up the car and boy was it packed! We barely had enough room for the 5 humans among all the stuff!! We then had a 3.5 hour car drive to northern arizona. It was a beautiful, scenic drive. Here is Ryder, all set up with a DVD and his "monkey" headphones:The area of Pinetop-Lakeside was BEAUTIFUL and cooler. We left 110+ sunny Phoenix for 80 degree, partially cloudy weather with big pine trees everywhere! The only bad thing was we were a little disappointed with our actual campsite. It sat about 100 yards from a major 6 lane road. So much for "wilderness"! But we made the most of it and we scoped out a new site that was much nicer for our next camping trip. We spent most days fishing...or should I say trying to fish! We did catch a few small fish quite a few times. Ryder LOVED it!! He thought fishing was quite possibly the best thing ever! After him nearly destroying a real pole, we eventually we bought him a 30" Spiderman kids pole and he had even more fun with that. It had a little plastic red fish on the end and he caught that one again and again, and was just as amused as the first time! Everytime he reeled it in, he would say "I caught one!". He also kept saying it was a baby fish and he would take it for a walk looking for its mama! Too cute!!Throwing rocks was another fun time. Ryder would count "ooooonnnnneeeee.....two.....three...TEN"! And huck the rock as far as he could. This probably had a little to do with why he couldn't catch many fish! He scared them all away.One evening we hiked to the backside of a lake and made a campfire next to the shore. Mindy taught Ryder the a-b-c's of campfire building and he really did help! He gathered lots of wood and then Mindy showed how to stack them in a tee-pee formation:Of course, every night was dinners made on the campfire (yum yum), and then plenty of S'mores (YUM YUM After three nights and 4 days with no showers, we were soooo ready to get home and get clean! It was a great fourth of July weekend!