Daddy Daughter Campout

I had some time off this week.  I have a Father and Son campout planned for September.  I decided to do a Daddy-Daughter campout.  Girls are definitely different than boys.  We had a lot of fun.

The awesome weather we had when we arrived.

It cleared long enough to quickly put up the tent (the girls did it with little help from me), and then it rained again.

Chillin' in the tent, getting ready to set up the sleeping bags.  I had to get something else from the pickup.  The girls practiced their "opera singing."  I told them that the bear on the mountain 2 mountains away was plugging his ears because they were so loud.

After awhile, the weather cleared enough that we could do some geocaching.

Kailyn pointing the way to go.

Jordan agreeing and adding her own thoughts, using the iPad as a GPS device.

All of these geocaching pictures may be staged because someone forgot the camera when we were actually geocaching.  However, we did find 2 treasures.  One was a prescription bottle with a paper in it, announcing we had found the cache.  A second was an old military ammo box with 2 die, 1 cigarette lighter, 1 deck of playing cards, 1 keychain with a mini lantern on it, a duct tape bracelet, an action figure, and a few other odds and ends.  Unfortunately, we forgot to bring our gift to exchange.  It was a lot of fun.  Next we had dinner.

Kailyn enjoying her painstakingly prepared Dinty Moore stew

Funny faces with the stew.

We met the neighbor campers, who had 2 girls the same ages as Kailyn and Jordan.  They invited us over for S'mores.  I didn't get any pictures, but the girls had a lot of fun with their newfound friends.  We watched a couple of short Youtube videos I had downloaded from the internet and onto my iPad, then we went to sleep.  It rained off and on all night.  The girls weren't aware of it, but I was.  I couldn't fill my air mattress because I forgot the inverter that hooks into the cigarette lighter.  Bummer.  The ground was hard and rocky.

This is one of those moments when I realized how different it was to camp with girls.  The girls woke up to play "patty cake."  

There was a little wrestling, as well.

Kailyn made us breakfast.  It was raining and really wet, so we cooked in the well-vented tent.

Jordan mostly complained about how cold she was.  She ate 1 pancake.

Kailyn sampling her spoils.

The neighbors put up a tight rope and invited the girls to walk along it with a helping hand.

Kailyn showing off her form.  I was getting the fishing poles ready.

We hiked about 3/4 mile up a pretty steep hill to the nearby lakes.  Kailyn getting ready to cast.

The cast is off.

Jordan spent a lot of the time learning to cast and trying to get the hook unstuck.

Look at that form!  Unfortunately, no fish were biting.  We met several fishermen.  No one even got a nibble.  Of course, the 20 preschool kids singing and throwing rocks into the water didn't help.

On the way home, it started to rain and then hail--hard.  We had to hide out under a group of trees.  The hail still fell through, knocking us around a bit.

The collection of hail under our "protected" area.

The girls were so proud of how much water was running down the trail.  They called it their "mini flash flood."  The trail did have lots of pooling and lots of water running down it.

Another mini-waterfall.  The owner of those toes kept complaining of being cold.  I wonder why.

We had rain for about 70% of the time we were camping, but the girls were great sports and didn't complain (except for cold toes).  We hiked back to our pickup and cruised home.  On the way home, Jordan requested Arby's for lunch, then we made it home where it was also raining.  We had to put our stuff in the garage and then pull it out the next day to get it dry.  All in all, a very fun camping trip the girls and I will remember for a long time.