The Great Memorial Day Weekend Camp Out

We started our MDW biking to McDonalds...nothing says all American like a McDonalds breakfast.  

 Andrew hung our flag pole...that we've had for a year or better.

We loaded up the car and drove to Lake Forest to spend the day with our friends camping. Our friends have family who live on Lake Michigan and have access to the beach. We took all our camping supplies (which are minimal) and all kinds of other nonsense to camp out.

 Building a fire pit. We put the kids in charge of collecting big rocks and putting them in a circle. They had the attention span to get about three rocks a piece.  Not very useful little people at times!

The property has a tree house. It was amazing. It was built by a professional 20 years ago. I think the kids could have lived up there. There is a bucket/pulley system which was really popular to send things up and down.

 Chilling with snacks with friends. The best one could ask for.

The resident male of the group (Andrew) started a camp fire for us! Grandy had bought hotdogs and buns and condiments for us. The kids helped to find sticks so we could cook our hotdogs and roast marshmallows for s'mores.

We had to make a split decision around 9:30pm after we saw heat lightening in the distance.  The radar showed rain coming toward us around 1am but it wasn't supposed to be heavy storming.  Thankfully we had the option of moving camp to the pool house.  The girls hadn't fallen asleep so it wasn't as difficult to get them up to the pool house.  The problem was that the stairs to the beach from the house were slick/rotted out railroad ties. It was dark and everyone had already fallen during the daytime. We were rushing things up the stairs trying not to get hurt.  We woke Cate and Will up to run them up to the pool house and try and get them back to sleep.  We threw everything we could into the storage area on the beach with the thought of getting it all in the morning and hunkered down for the night. It wasn't 30 minutes after getting settled into the pool house that it began to storm something ugly. I am so glad we made the decision to move when we did. It could have been really ugly.

It was ugly the next morning when Andrew went down to the beach to see the condition of everything and found our tent 10 feet out in Lake Michigan. He went out to save the tent that was full of water and who knows what else. I appreciate the effort but upon arriving home we threw it in the trash.

Willie got to wake up and drink some cold chocolate milk out by the pool.  Not a bad life!

 Grandy also has a playground on her property. The kids had so much fun.  And so did the adults.