Camping with the Daniels

When you have one family in Virginia, one in Arkansas, and one in Iowa it is hard to see each other.  We decided to work with that problem and go camping in southern Indiana (which if you look for the middle point of all of those states it is right there.

 So we camped from July 9th to the 13th in O'Bannon Woods state park.  It was a lovely site with a playground and the bathhouse nearby.  We had all of our sites touching so it was like we had one huge site.

The campground also had a wonderful aquatic center with pool, splash pad, huge water slide (which Grace loved).

Water guns which Glen loved to shoot, but did not like being shot at with.  The kids loved it there.  We only got to go twice but it was nice having that option.

The aquatic center was a great place because the weather was so very hot.

It was almost always 90 degrees or hotter and very humid.  However, no rain fell to cool of the situation.  When camping it is good that it does not rain, but we were hoping it would to just break the oppressive heat.  But we had fun in spite of the heat.

Most of the time, while we were camping we just took some time to rest and relax.  Grace found a good place to read, and start to learn about Dog Man which is now one of her favorite series.

Glen loved playing with his Star Wars magnets and played a "game" that he made up with anyone that would play.

Here Grandpa Steve is trying to learn how to play.  However, with Glen's rules he is always the winner...

As I said, resting and relaxing.  This time it is Matt in the nice spot of the hammock.

Grace again.

We spent a day at Boone Caverns.  It was founded by Squire Boone (brother to Daniel Boone).  It was an old time cavern, candy shop, mill, gem mining, candle making, and other things.  Here we are looking for gems and pretty stones.

Grace found a beautiful green stone.

Glen had a few good finds also.  In fact we got many beautiful stones out of the deal.

This is the water wheel that runs the mill.  The water comes out of the caverns.  It was a beautiful site even though it was a lot of walking and very hot.  Did I mention it was hot that week?

I think the kids were wanting to jump the fence and play in the run off stream that was down the hill from them.

Not to be outdone, Glen also got in some resting and relaxing with a book.  It was one of his Star Wars books.

On another day we decided to try out one of the hiking trails that was on the camp grounds.  It was a 2 mile hike.  Here are the girls being our fearless leaders as we start on the hike.

A little farther back we find the rest of the crew.  It was Chris, Katie, Ellie, Matt, Glen, Grace and I.

We all finished the hike and I think had a good time.

A snack of smores.  What could be better with camping?  Other than Glen's other favorite thing to do, which was find all of the spiders around the campsite and pick them up to transport them to a safe location where predators would not get them.  We found that kind of cute, Ellie however did not like that very much.  She did not like the bugs that were found while camping.

Playing catch with Grandpa Steve.

Cooking with Grandma Sue.  Grace tried to help with the cooking every chance she got.  Grandma Sue was really good at giving her tasks that she could help out with.

It was a great week, but once in the car we realized how exhausting it was.  So glad that we were able to spend time with family and make those memories.