Life Is Good

Our weekend consisted of camping, fishing, flying kites and playing with worms.  Life doesn’t get much better than that in my opinion.  

Every year we wait to start thinking about camping until half way through the summer and by that point the summer monsoons roll in and it rains every weekend.  (I am not a fan of camping in the rain.)  This year we are making an effort to spend more time outdoors and more time as a family.  We went on our first camping trip of the year to Patagonia Lake in southern Arizona.  It was a little windy but we had a great time.

The campground was full but there were plenty of uncrowded areas to fish.  The kids really enjoyed sitting by the lake fishing.  I did not think they would last for as long as they did.  And they kept wanting to go back!

Little Mister even caught a fish!  He made it look so easy.  Sat down, cast his line, sat there for a few minutes and reeled in a fish.

It was windy Saturday and Little Miss was having a hard time fishing because the wind kept blowing her bobber back towards the shore.  5am Sunday morning she wakes up, looks outside and notices the trees are not blowing and suggests that we head to the lake while it’s still calm.  As cute at that was, there was no way I was getting out of my warm sleeping bag at 5am.  My compromise – The Husband took the kids fishing one last time after breakfast while the rest of the adults packed up camp.

It was fairly windy off and on and some friends that were with us happened to bring kites.  I never would have thought to pack kites but I am glad they did.  The kids had a blast.  Watching my kids running around with huge smiles on their faces makes my world go round.

And now for the worms.  The kids wanted to fish with worms so we sent them to the camp store with some money to buy worms.  They came back so excited, not only with a container full of worms, but with these plastic bug houses for their soon-to-be pet worms.  They played with the worms every chance they could for the next two days.  Here are the girls sitting in the back of the truck, eating apple sauce and playing with their worms.

Here they are giving the worms a bath in the lake.

Eventually the worms all made their way into the lake in an attempt to become fish bait, but the kids had more fun playing with the worms than I could have imagined.

The campground was nice, although the spaces are a little closer to each other than I prefer.  There are two developed campgrounds – west and east- and several boat-in campsites.  The east campground is really only for RVs.  You could put a tent on the sites but they are all on the side of a hill and there is not much space for tents.  Definitely not good if you have little kids.  Because the sites in the east campground are on a hill they have good views of the lake and mountains though.  The west campground is ideal for tent camping.

We stayed in spot 93.  It was fine until Sunday morning when everyone was dumping their RVs.  I did not realize when I made the reservations that the spot was close to the dump station.  The map on the reservation page happened to leave that off.  The sites can supposedly hold 12 people but we had eight and three tents and we were almost too crowded.  We used up every inch of our space possible.  The majority of these sites are one family sites.  If you are going with friends I would suggest reserving sites next to each other.  Spots 107 & 108 seem to be the best spots in the west campground.  They are right on the edge of the lake, have several parking spaces in front of them and appear to have more space than the other sites.  Enough for several tents.  The restrooms were cleaned several times a day and overall were nice for as busy of a campground as it was.   

The lake has a beach for playing, boat rentals, walking paths, great birding, and even horseshoes.  Overall, we had an enjoyable time.  Even though the sites were close together the campground was surprisingly quiet.  Not sure if it is always like that or we happened to have a quiet crowd this past weekend.

I will leave you with one final picture – the sun setting over the lake.

Happy Monday!  Have a great week!