Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The Family That Packs Together...

I guess we just didn't get enough family time on our 10-day vacation so we decided to go on a family backpack trip the weekend after we returned.

Marc and I were both nervous as we didn't want to press our luck, but we also knew that it would be hard.  We decided to do the same hike that Marc took Sister on last summer for the "Father, Daughter" trip he'd organized with the brothers-in-law. Horse Flats trail up on the Alpine Loop.

We had prepped the kids all week long and made sure that we kept them on schedule by not missing any summer camp and going on Friday after they were done.

At about 4pm we headed out. The kids all seemed pretty excited. I don't think Baby really had any idea what was about to go on, but she was along for the ride anyway.

We got to the trail head, started getting everyone situated into their gear and Marc and I made one wrong move with Brother by telling him to "wait" while we were trying to get his pack on and he melted.

It took me a good 30 minutes to get him to calm down enough to even stand by the family and then with a bit of a continued struggle we had his pack on and we were ready for our big "starting out" photo op. Selfie Sticks can be a little complicated when you are wearing an ill-fitting backpack...


It was a good walk/hike into Horse Flat Meadows and we only had to endure Baby's freak-outs every time there was a bee... "bee" meaning anything that made a buzzing noise, ie., flies, gnats, bees, hornets... even some moths, apparently.

She was excited though, about finding the fort she and her cousins had made last summer

Baby was happy to find my lip balm

And Brother, as usual was just thrilled to have his microphone and Shania Twain in the wilderness—great entertainment.

After we were ready to settle down for the night Brother had decided that he was freaked out by the owl that was hooting across the meadow in the trees.

Baby had to sleep in my arms the entire night so I really didn't get a whole lot of restful sleep, but Sister was out cold.

Oh, and Ranger was with us too and, thank goodness, he saved Sister from her anxiety a number of times, not only that, but he helped her go to sleep too.

I have to say that he's not a good watchdog though, because somewhere throughout the night I think we had a critter (big or small, not sure) trying to get into our tent. It was tapping the tent against my head so it seemed to be curious. When we woke up in the morning we saw that our visitor had tried to get into our backpack too... I'll try not to think too hard about what came to visit our camp...

Anyway, I put together a video so you could enjoy a bit of our trip with us.

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