We had a great Thanksgiving this year, the weather was amazing and the food was delicious. There was a hike involved and, later, a law breaking ride on a golf cart to collect some greens for our outdoor decorating needs. In all of that excitement one of my brothers mentioned wanting to go camping one more time this year. He said this within earshot of my son, who is nothing if not an outdoorsmen who dreams of hunting and has two parents who type a lot as opposed to gather anything outside of a super market.

Also, we’re crazy, and it sounded fun. We might not be able to sit in a blind with him and educate him on the best practices for ethical hunting but we’re huge fans of our kids and if they’re in to it, we’ll get there.

So, it was decided! We were going to camp on the ground, outside, in late November. The weather looked amazing, the radar clear. So the day after Thanksgiving we packed up the car with our “six person” tent we got as a wedding gift and have used all of 4 times since and we headed to Yankee Springs.

The adventure starts.

We set up camp in record time for not being “tent” campers, with zero arguments (we continue to defy odds in the marriage counseling circles with our ability to do tedious things together and not threaten divorce: kayaking or canoeing, putting together a dresser from Ikea, set up a tent …) but after our agreed upon meet-up time came and went we started wondering if we missed something. Which we did. We set up the entirety of our camp at the WRONG CAMPSITE. Wrong campground even.

Fast forward to the correct campsite …

GLORIOUS, I tell you! We set up (again) and watched the sun go down over Deep Lake while stoking a fire to cook dinner over. The boys and men fashioned a bench out of fallen logs and branches since, in our amazing packing, we forgot everything but the tent and our sleeping bags and pepperoni. The essentials, if you ask Aaron. He packed. And I’m not kidding.

We cooked both meals we shared in this cast iron dutch oven that my brother owns and can I just say that if everything is going to hell in life, it can be fixed with a meal out of one of these cooked over a fire and shared under the stars?

There’s poetry to eating this way.

And I was reading it all weekend.

After dinner we played a couple games of capture the flag in the dark and I managed to run through the woods and stay upright in the dark until the very last game when a stone, out of nowhere, cropped up and took me out. Flat on my face. It was awesome. So much laughing and giggling and screeching and hiding and sitting in jail and running and it felt so good.

We all went to our tents fairly early but it was very dark and hard to tell by that point what time it really was. We gazed at the stars and watched the fire prick the air and not long after, the smoke escaping in whispers.

We got all tucked in to our various sleeping bags and blankets and then the real fun began. It was a night to remember full of unexpected rain, hardly any sleep, a lot of middle the night giggling fits because WTF and kids who couldn’t get comfortable and ended up sleeping in tiny rain puddles – and at one point, all 4 of us on a full size sleeping pad around 3:30 am wondering what now?

But the sun came up and there was coffee.

And coffee cake.

We hiked a bit, laughed about our night and broke down camp while the kids ran around with walkie-talkies.

We came home so incredibly tired, smelling like campfire and wet socks. But so happy. Stupid happy to have done the thing. Sleep (or pretend to sleep) on the ground in late November overlooking a lake by the fire.

And I was so thankful.