Peace, Love and Roasted Marshmallows

Labor Day weekend is when my extended family holds its annual family camping trip. Supposedly (I don't know who's doing the record keeping), next year will be the 25th such trip. It's probably my favorite family event. Making fires, playing euchre, drinking beer and eating hotdogs for breakfast, lunch and dinner are all activities that are in my proverbial wheelhouse. With it being the 25th anniversary and all, I'm expecting all Murphys to be in attendance next year so you can pretty much assume that I'm looking forward to it as of right now. I'm guessing that altogether next year we'll occupy no less than twenty campsites.

With Darwin only being 12 days old, we decided against partaking in the camping this year, but we did make day trips down to the campground on Friday and Sunday. The kids had an excellent time and we felt bad taking off for home both nights. Next year, we'll do the real thing.

Staying dry was one motivation for skipping the overnight tent accommodations. There was ample rainfall Sunday morning and more than a couple campers (and their gear) got soaked. We didn't totally escape the water, though. While we arrived after the rain had stopped, there were copious amounts of standing water for the kids to explore. And by explore, I mean dive into. There was too much water to realistically keep the kids out of it, so I just gave in and accepted the fact that I was going to be dealing with very, very dirty children all day. It was worth it simply for the fact that this may have been the single greatest day of Truman's two years of existence.












The remainder of these photos were taken by Jameson. I always like to get his (three feet off the ground) perspective on things. The first photo, with all the chairs in the circle, is pretty much what comes to mind when I think of our family camping trips. Lots of chatting, story telling, joking and catching up.