For Katie’s 39th birthday we packed up the van again and headed up to Rolley Lake Provincial Park just 50 minutes northeast of our house. We had our friends Sam and Lauren join us again on their trip with their daughter Evelyn (all the kids go to daycare together). It works out quite well to have the 3 kids and 4 parents since it affords us that extra minute in a weekend that we get to rush off and use the washroom. It seems we’re always an adult short regardless of how many there are around. The kids love running around the woods and exploring, so we definitely have to keep our eye on them as they keep expanding their boundaries by the hour.
The kids loved helping mommy blow out the candles on her birthday cake, you can see that in the video below at 2:37. Lauren had to go back into town for a few hours of work, and ended up picking up another birthday cake since the apple pie that I bought, and had hidden in the car was discovered by Addison’s foot as she snuck into the car to play around. So we ended up eating the pie early, and blowing out the candles on the cake later the following night.
The lake is a little on the small side, but nice to paddle around on, so we spent the warmer afternoons out on the water. We were lucky enough to spot a freshwater otter, and he let us come up pretty close and watch him eating a fish. I didn’t see any of the other fishermen on the lake have that much luck.
The kids also got to spend some time around the campfire on this trip. We rarely find the time to sit around by the time we eat dinner and start shuffling everyone off to bed, but we had nice weather most of the time and were able to fire up the propane firepit (campfire ban most of the summer) and the kids enjoyed it quite a bit. This has us going to bed a little bit later than normal, so that puts the kids into quite a tizzy, and difficult to put down, but overall it wasn’t too bad. They have very busy days and they pretty much fall asleep once we can get them settled down – even though they are still pretty excited to get into their little sleeping tents inside the big tent.
It was a great weekend, and a nice way to finish off our very busy summer with lots of camping trips. I think our final count was that we spend 17 nights in the tent this summer – more than I would have thought we’d get in, but the kids really do enjoy it!
Watch the video from our weekend at Rolley Park, (length 5:56).
See all the photos here.
