Camping by Lake Erie

This last weekend we finally decided to take the boys camping. We were heading down to Kirtland to spend Saturday with the Marsh's, and so we found a nice campsite on the edge of Lake Erie, East Harbor State Park. There we swam in Lake Erie, and spent the night in a very small tent... At least it was small for all five of us. Anyone have a slightly larger tent they want to sell for cheap? Here are some pictures, mostly in chronological order, showing our camping trip.

Here we are in Lake Erie. The water was nice and warm (surprising even me). From this picture, it looks like we are out fairly deep, and in fact, we are probably about 100 ft from shore. The two girls in the background do give it away, don't they? We are in about a foot of water, which was really fun for Benjamin, except for the two times that waves knocked him over. He survived.

When we got back from the beach, we found that the nature center was having a show on reptiles. I don't know if the boys really liked it.... Jeffrey stuck around through the whole presentation. The highlight was when the turtles pooped on the ranger. A close second was that the boys got a chance to touch a real live snake. Even Jenny got up the courage to touch it (but only because Benjamin wanted to go up...)After the beach and the reptiles, the boys were ready for the real camping experience. Everyone wanted to roast hotdogs, as can be seen here.

Ben was very possesive of roasting his own hotdog. I don't even think it got warm. But, they all enjoyed the fire and the experience.
The tent was fairly small (a four man), and so after checking the weather report, I decided to leave the rain fly off (so we could get better air circulation in the tent). I would have thought a zero percent chance of precipitation meant that there was no chance it would rain. Jeffrey kept telling me to put the rain fly on just in case, but would I listen? I don't think so. Out of the mouth of babes... At 6:00 Jenny woke me up saying it was starting to sprinkle inside the tent. I got the rain fly on before any serious rain started falling. But, after a couple of minutes, it really started to pour. Jonny was asleep underneath a dripping corner of the tent. If I had the video camera, it would have been great. We moved him more to the middle, and he stayed asleep. But, the rain became so loud, that he assumed this sleeping position.
When the rain slowed down about 7:00, and the tent was sufficiently leaky (it's a good tent, but it was really coming down), we got all the boys in the car. Here's a picture of them, in various degrees of wakefulness.

Here's what the rain looked like out the front window of the car. We wanted to have hot chocolate and oatmeal for breakfast, and we eventually did, once the rain stopped.We took down the tent wet, because we didn't know how long the storm would stick around. I mentioned to Jenny we needed to clean off the water from the tarp, and Benjamin decided to help. He went to his diaper bag, and grabbed some wet-wipes. I think he ended up using about half a box, but he was too cute and too good of a helper to stop. So, that's our camping trip. I will try and post the continuing saga of the trip to Kirtland in the next couple of days.