Preparing for Camping...

So, when I was little, my family went camping every year, mostly in the Adirondacks, but also in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI (Anne of Green Gables lived here!), even to Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod (great bike trails on the Cape). My Mum was a school teacher before she retired and my Dad was a baker, so he would close up the bakery for three weeks and off we would go. How fun! We were quite the sight, I'm sure, especially when all my brothers came along too (I have four older brothers). We would use the van that my father had for the bakery, pull a tent trailer, bring a kayak (a Folboat that we made ourselves! it was untippable, great for kids, but really easy to paddle, too), a little Sunfish sailboat, bikes for everyone, army surplus hammocks and a huge tarp... Crazy, lol.

We stopped going when I was about 13 or so (parents divorced, I was the only one left at home with Mum at that point) but I have great memories. Which means I now drag my family camping!

We're heading up to camp near Camden, Maine the end of June for a week and are running around finding equipment. We've been with Bella before, but now that Conall is along, too, we needed a bigger tent (hooray for LL Bean) and a rooftop carrier for our little Subaru WRX (no SUV or mini-van for us) (though if we had another kid we'd need one [I like this one]. Why do they make car seats so darn HUGE? no way could we fit three in the back seat, argh; I'm sure some manufacturer could come up with a smaller but still safe car seat in the name of decreasing the number of SUVs on the road for goodness' sakes... I digress, lol). Our sea kayaks will continue to languish in the garage, alas, until the kids are bigger (very tippy, unlike the Folboat).

I'm having all sorts of fun making lists of things to bring. I'm a list kind of gal, lol. And I'm knitting, too, just in case it's cold. Check it out:



Little Man Conall in a funny bulky sweater. I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky in Cape Cod and a basic sweater pattern from the Yarn Girls Guide to Kids' Knits, and it knitted up lickety split. (Good thing what with my short attention span for knitting projects...). It even has simple ribbing throughout, whoo-hooo. And I actually sewed it together! Good grief! I hate seaming! LOL. I'm making one for Bella from the same yarn, a raglan sleeve sweater (for some reason I find raglan seams easy to sew neatly). Hooray for bulky yarn for kids sweaters. And hooray for Knit Picks for making affordable yarn - nice not to spend a fortune for a sweater that the baby is just going to drool all over anyway.