Summer, sun and smores

Sorry for the hiatus, but it's summertime and all. We've had some terrific weather, especially the last couple of weeks. The only complaint is that on Saturday it rained for 2 minutes, sheesh!

We've been pretty busy, doing things around the house but mostly having fun as you can see in the slideshow on the sidebar. Rory made a "prickly garden" which we've populated with pet rocks to keep the cacti company, Myer tasted his first corn on the cob, Rory got a big boy bike and had Ardan over to spend the night... lots more on these and other topics in the next couple of days. This post I wanted to share the pictures from our recent camping fiasco trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park.

In addition to Lassen, we spent half a day in McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial state park, which is not very far from Lassen. What a beautiful region! We were all impressed with the scenery. Neither Matt or I had ever been to either park, and we can't wait for the boys to get bigger so we can do more extensive hiking. The irony of the timing of our visit was not lost on us as the state is preparing to close several parks because of the budget crisis (I don't know if McArthur-Burney is on that list).

This was Myer's first camping trip; Rory is an old hand, having been to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. We broke up the trip by spending the first night in a motel about an hour from Lassen and planned to spend two nights camping. However, the fickle camping gods had different plans - that night when I went into the tent to put the boys to bed, the zipper got stuck and broke. Then around midnight the air mattress decided to leak, and 2/4 of us spent the night tossing and turning in between muttering "you still awake?" and "yep. we're too old for this!" 1/4 of us is now researching pros and cons of renting/buying a pop-up trailer for all future camping trips; another 1/4 is organizing the pictures; the other 2/4 had a solid night's sleep and an overall blast. Needless to say, we packed it in the next morning and spent the last night of our trip in another motel, close to McArthur-Burney.

At least we had one night under the stars and trees with requisite hobo stew and smores. Far from a bust, it was a great trip - but four days was too brief!