Our First Family Camping Trip

It's been a whole year since I posted last. Shame on ME. But what do you expect? I'm busy tending to a stubborn 19 month old all day long. :) So we went on our first little family camping trip, just the 3 of us, a few weeks back. It was a LOT of work but so much fun. I was really worried taking Carter up the mountain but he did surprisingly well. We found out he actually sleeps much better camping than he does at home in his crib. Go figure.

Ricky's idea of camping may be different from others. He hates government regulations, cement firepits, and already matted down camp spots. He will not camp where a million other people are with their camping trailers side by side. He says it isn't 'real' camping. I love this about him. My husband couldn't be more of a real man who does things his own way:) Anyway, because of that reason, we scouted out a campsite a couple weeks before that nobody had ever been to. It is up in the mountains of Alpine, just above my parent's house. My parents let us borrow their Rhino and we loaded, and I mean loaded, it up and headed straight up the mountain and set up camp. It was probably only about a 20 minute ride to the campsite.

Ricky and I both did an equal amount of work. He focused more on setting up camp and getting the fire going while I worried about food. Let me just say, we ate good. We ate like kings up in them mountains! We got up to our campsite on Friday evening, around 5-6. So our first meal was dinner. I made dutch oven pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches on ciabatta buns. We served them with coleslaw and baked beans. It may not sound like much, but considering the fact that we had never used cast iron cookware before, we were pretty proud of oursevles. We brought cut up watermelon, grapes, and a plethra of junk food to snack on as well:) That's what camping is all about, right?

For breakfast I made buttermilk pancakes (from scratch-I made the batter at home before we left). We served that with cheesy eggs and Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage patties. We cooked everything on our new cast iron cookware set Ricky bought before the trip. It was SO good. I know the more we go, the more I will become familiar with cast iron cooking. It is hard to get the temperature just right. BTW, do not buy cheap charcoal briquets. They don't heat up enough. We ended up just using our own fire and coals to cook.

For dessert I made dutch oven peach cobbler from scratch (and I used the peaches I canned last fall). We served that with vanilla ice cream. SO good! I actually messed up on cooking the cobbler but it was still delicious:)

Carter tried being helpful while we were camping. He tried helping daddy with starting the fire and he grabbed the shovel and started digging when we first got there (pictured). He is very observant and copies a lot of what we do now.

(just a neat picture of the clouds the day before) :)

(We found a pretty neat spot!)