Here's to 10 years (and camping!)

 

Well, it's official!  We've made it to the 10 year mark and we're still going strong :)  I'll never forget, when we were planning our wedding, and thinking through dates Dad told me "the first two weekends in October are always beautiful".  Well, he sure wasn't wrong!  The day we got married it was bright and sunny and warm!  In the 80's.  The leaves were changing colors and you could tell that Fall was in the air, but it was one of the last few warm days of summer.  Well, fast forward 10 years and we got another great weekend!  

For quite a few years now we've planned an adult only trip to Madison with Jamie and Zach to celebrate our anniversary.  We've stayed in hotels, camped, even rented a very strange AirBnB....but this year, COVID was just more than I could handle and in those months during the spring and early summer where everything was being canceled I decided I didn't want to screw around with having to make a plan and two back up plans, so I booked us a few camping spots in Sturgeon Bay figuring it would be pretty unlikely for them to cancel camping too (one of the few activities they said was "safe" early on).  

Just like the years past, Jamie and Zach joined us, but this time we brought along the kids and the dog and just made it a big family weekend!  And boy, did we luck out on the weather.  It was beautiful, albeit colder than I was prepared for!  I don't know, the season change caught me off guard this year.  I think it's partly because it was mid-70's for the majority of last week, and on Friday, when we left home for camping, it was 80 degrees!  By the time we arrived at our campsite in Wisconsin though, it took me less than 10 minutes to be rummaging through my bag in the camper looking for pants and a sweatshirt.  Somehow I thought to pack three extra t-shirts, but not a single coat, hat or mitten in sight.  It was mid 50's during the day so we got buy with pants and sweatshirts, but by the time it got dark, it got COLD and we used a lot of wood to keep the fire warm enough for us all.

We hiked, we geo-cache'd, we laughed, we ate...we drank beer and ate smore's and soaked up our final camping trip of the year.  

We camped at Potowanami State Park in Door County Wisconsin.  We've camped there a few times over the years but it didn't bring back any memories for me until we got to this spot in the hike.  It's called "The Old Ski Hill" because, I assume, this cleared area was once a small ski hill.  When we came out on the overlook the kids were excited and wanted to walk down the steep hill on the path.  I made them all raise their right hands and vow to not whine about walking back up it.  And, true to their word, not a single whine or request to be carried....they made it all the way down and back up again!

Oh yeah, and did I tell you that we're a geo-cache family now?!?  HA!  Ryan started it earlier this summer when we were camping with Joey/Andy and Mom/Dad in Iowa and let me tell you what....if you have little kids that aren't too excited about hiking, then you need to get yourself a geo-cache app and get them excited about it because it's really changed our hiking game!  This summer we've hiked the local forest preserves and found all of the geo's near our house.  The girls really enjoy the treasure hunt of it and it's fun for adults too!

We found the coolest geo-cache item this time around!  The boxes usually contain a little notebook to write your name/date on, logging that you found it, a pen/pencil and then a few random little kid toys or trinkets that previous "finders" have left behind for you to look through.  The idea is that you take one thing, and leave something in it's place.  Well, we usually try to get the kids to leave the stuff in there, because, really, who needs more trinkets?!  But this time we found a little koala bear attached to a necklace with a dog tag on the other end.  The dog tag had a tracking code on it and a website listed so we decided to take it from the box and when we got back to the campsite I did a little research.

Turns out, you log the tracking code and the person who started it, can track the tags progress from geo to geo.  This owner even gave the tag a "goal" saying that it wanted to travel to Arizona, California and a few other places before returning "home" to the Bloomington/Champaign area.  So, Ryan will be taking it with him when he leaves for California this weekend and he'll deposit it in a geo-cache in California for someone to find and help it along on it's journey.  How fun is that!?  

Anyways, enough on that subject.  HA!  Long story short, we had a great time with friends, as we always do and I'm so thankful that we're able to still get some peaks of "normal life" into our days and weeks.  Who knows what the fall/winter will bring, but for now, we're grateful to be able to spend the weekend with friends, doing the things we love most.  Not necessarily a romantic 10 year anniversary weekend, but I wouldn't change a thing about it!