Kristin’s Playground

I admit - I tried to hurry up and finish my 101 things list on Thursday; we had plans to go camping on Friday, and I wanted to get off on a good start.

Early Friday afternoon we headed out to go to the Indiana Dunes Campground. The campsite is very near Michigan City, IN, and it was a little bizarre to me to be camping so near civilization. Within a couple of miles, you could see a giant cooling tower for a power plant, and just a couple more miles you can go to Meijer, just in case you forgot anything. On Flickr, jcburns shares this photo of the cooling tower. It’s looks like it’s right out of the Simpsons.

When we arrived at the campground mid-afternoon, Logan’s friends were still at the beach, so we took our time settling in. Eventually, everyone made it back to the campsite, Anya met the other three dogs staying there (not terribly well, unfortunately, though they learned to mostly ignore each other later), and we started to think about dinner. The boys took to starting the coals and grilling some burgers - both beef and black bean. Quite tasty. As the sun started going down, we all continued to sit around and talk by the fire, roasted some marshmallows and made little dessert sandwiches with a sandwich iron. I swear, sandwich irons are brilliant. You can take two slices of bread, coat the outside with some butter and fill the inside with whatever you like - cheese, or pie filling, or nutella and marshmallows. Yum. I took a couple of pictures of the campfire. The auto white balance made some look bizarrely purple, but this one was a bit more realistic:

We went to bed late, and unfortunately, I woke up a couple of times during the night to the sound of rain. We stayed in our sleeping bags, hoping it would let up and we’d be able to have a good day, but it didn’t look likely. So, we tried to quickly pack up all our rain-soaked gear, got ridiculously soaked ourselves, and our camping trip was cut unfortunately short. I didn’t even have time to go see the beach. At least I can see it on Flickr, thanks to people like lapstrake:

We did manage to get one good night of camping, even if we didn’t get to do the hiking or photography I normally like to do on camping trips. Now, if only it will stop raining here long enough for us to set up, dry out and clean our tent!

And before I go, I can’t help but include destabee’s photo of this squirrel found there in the winter. Too amusing!