Camping at Stonybrook

This past Friday night Kurt and I went camping with a group of families at Stonybrook park. Five other families ended up going and we had a lot of fun. I went up early Friday with another mom and we set up the tents and went hiking before everyone else showed up (our husbands carpooled). The forecast said rain, but Friday ended up being a beautiful day and I'm glad we went up early.
Naomi was a real trooper on the hike. We went on the East Rim Trail which is 1.25 miles long and Naomi walked almost the whole way. She would have me carry her on the really steep parts, but for the rest, she wanted to walk by herself. This picture is a bit deceiving because most of the trail wasn't this smooth.
The hike was really beautiful. Here is a collage of some of the views from the hike. I especially loved the waterfall and the view of the gorge.
The trail took us from the campground to the playground at the other park. However, we didn't know that starting out. We thought it would be a short little loop leading back to our campsite, so we didn't take anything with us--water, food, band-aids or diapers. Somewhere down the trail, we were starting to wonder how much longer it would go on and whether we should turn back when some hikers came by and told us we were almost to the end and that the end was the park. We decided to finish the trail and get ice cream at the park shop while we waited the hour or so for our husbands to arrive and pick us up. We persevered to the end, only to discover that the shop was only open Sat-Sun. Lisa and I were pretty bummed, but the kids seemed to be distracted enough by the toys on the playground to ignore the fact we were all starting to get hungry. Then Lisa's nine-month-old had a blow-out. It was quite the adventure. Since we had no diapers, Lisa had to approach another parent on the playground and ask if she could buy a diaper. They were nice and let Lisa have a diaper, but they only had size 6 diapers, and her baby wore a size 3. Even though we weren't fully prepared for the hike, I'm glad we went. The views were beautiful. It really is pretty country up here.

Eventually the boys showed up and I watched the kids while Lisa went back to get her car with all the car seats. Her baby was sad when she left, but I told the kids to make faces at her to cheer her up, which did the trick. It was pretty cute to watch.
Naomi had fun around the campfire and playing in the tents. It was fun having so many friends around.
Naomi is sharing her teddy grahams. Usually she is a bit possessive, so I was glad she was so willing to share this time.

The next day we were going to go hiking, but it starting raining pretty hard and Naomi was pretty tired, so we decided to go home. Other than the rain at the end, it was fun being so close to nature and hanging out with some really fun people. Overall it was a great trip and I'm glad we went. We'll have to go again soon (any takers?).
I thought I should post a picture of Kurt, so here is us at IHOP the night we got back because I didn't want to cook dinner. I love this picture because Kurt looks so calm and Naomi is fuzzy from moving around too fast for my camera. She was all over the place.

I wanted to add one little detail about IHOP. We chose IHOP because we had a coupon for buy one dinner entree, get one dinner entree free. I ordered the chicken salad and Kurt ordered chicken strips. It was all fine and dandy until we went to pay. The server told us they couldn't honor our coupon because we had to order the dinner menus items (like ribs) and we had ordered lunch menu items. Are you kidding me? Who really distinguishes lunch and dinner items like that? I purposely didn't order breakfast-sounding items just in case, but apparently I didn't take it far enough. I thought that was a little cheap.