Leaky tents and other weekend memories

Here's Tina, asleep 15 minutes in!

Last Thursday after Ian's soccer game we drove about two hours south to Brandywine campground. Memorial Day weekend is the annual gathering of east coast units in Raleigh, NC and since our last camping plans were rained out we decided to leave Thursday night, camp and drive the rest of the way Friday.

Unfortunately forecasts for much of the state were again calling for rain, scattered though, so we decided to risk it. If we could just get our tents up before rain, we figured we should be ok. Well, we weren't.

We got our tents up, the kids asleep and tried to make a fire. We didn't bring any firewood because we figured there'd be somewhere to buy some. There was, but they closed about 30 minutes before! So the girls begged a few pieces off people across from us. The pieces they gave us were too big to really get anything going, so after attempting some marshmallows over burning paper, they gave up and headed to the bath house to get ready for bed.


Meanwhile, the rain began. Hard.

We've upgraded our storage system since our first camping
experience together.

We were in our tent trying to sleep and the girls came back to find water sitting in their tent so they decided to sleep in the van. I (Heidi) woke around midnight to drips on my face and Mike never fell asleep, feeling the foot of his sleeping bag getting wet and watching water creeping in around the edge of the tent. He got up and drove the girls to the only hotel several miles back (by the gas station that wasn't open) and found that it also wasn't open, despite the "vacancy" in the window. Good thing we'd decided to wait to get the kids up!

So the girls stayed in the van and we took their sleeping bags (which they weren't using) and used them to line the inside of our tent to keep the water from getting to us! It worked and we were able to sleep, some. The thunder was actually really cool, feeling the rumbling from the ground. Would have been cooler if we weren't so worried about getting wet, but still cool.

This was our set-up for our first
camping trip together at church retreat
in August; trash bags and a sled!

It stopped raining sometime in the early morning hours and we were able to make a great breakfast (using the camp stove, still no firewood) before heading for Raleigh.

On to Raleigh, where our time was much less dicey, but no less memorable! We enjoyed a lot of time just being together with the other groups and our trip to the beach on Saturday. Plus, SA director Susan Nisly was there, which was great and she bought us ice cream at the Purple House Friday night! We love her! (Not just for the ice cream of course!)



Saturday, as noted, we went to the beach which, though it took some convincing of Ian, is also the ocean. He had an argument several people saying that we were not going to the ocean, we were going to the beach. Stubborn five year old, where does he get that? Anyway, we made it to the beach/ocean. It rained lightly on our drive there and was very overcast for the first couple of hours which actually turned out very nice because for the last couple it got really hot and sunny. Just enough for quite a few people to get burned.

Sunday was fairly low key. We attended church at Raleigh Mennonite in the morning. People walked around town or hung out at the house in the afternoon and that night after delicious homemade pizza we went to the dollar theater. 

On the way home Monday we stopped in Harrisonburg, VA for lunch at Hannah from Johnstown's house. It was a fun stopover and they fed us well!