Camping success!

We are unwinding from our first camping trip as a family. We just spent the night at a campground in Estes Park, and I am proud to report that it was a complete success! We all had a great time, despite a flat tire and four rounds of really impressive thunderstorms.

Tents are awesome!

Lunch in a mini camp chair, and helping organize pine needles on the picnic bench. We stayed at the Estes Park East Portal Campground, and it was great. It's a pretty typical campground: lots of families, sites pretty close together, some spots for people with RVs. And there was a bathroom with running water and a shower! I am not sure this counts as glamping, because we still slept in a tent, but some people definitely had a whole setup with electricity and running water. I'd personally rather stay somewhere more remote, but this had a lot of pluses: we could reserve a site (and not risk driving around in the wilderness for hours looking for a place to camp), we could have a campfire in the fire pit (a lot of Colorado is under a fire ban right now), and it is literally walking distance into Rocky Mountain National Park. There are a couple of great hikes with trailheads at the campground, so if we stayed here again, it would be a great base for some longer day hikes.

We took a short hike into Rocky Mountain National Park from our campground.

 

Smelling flowers

Kyle's awesome thunderstorm-proofing saved the day!

First time trying a roasted marshmallow. She wasn't too sure about it so I helped her eat four of them.

We all slept relatively well. Lea slept like a champ, but her sleeping acrobatics meant that I got a foot in the face for about half the night, and she's also a pillow thief - Kyle had to use a sweatshirt to sleep on. This weekend was really a trial run just to get the hang of camping with a toddler - we made sure to pack lots of things for her to do, in case we were stuck inside the tent because of rain. And we tried to keep her bedtime routine as similar to home as possible. I think things went really well, and it was like anything else with having a kid: we just had to give it a try to see how it went. We're already talking about where to go next!