Vacation in the Sequoias Part 1

 This year we decided to take a camping trip for our family vacation. We found a great campsite up in the Sequoias, where it was nice and cool. Since we were going the last week in August, temperature and weather were very important!  And it was only about an hour and a half from Grandma & Grandpa! So we bought a new tent and all the gear we needed, made a ton of different lists, somehow packed our car to the gills and headed up!  The boys were SUPER excited. I don't think they had a clue what to expect, but they saw all the "cool" new toys (otherwise known as Dollar Tree specials!) that were allowed to go in the dirt and they knew it had to be fun! So we got up to our campsite and set up camp. That took quite a while!  But once we were set up, it was nice and cozy. They boys had a blast getting dirty. And I mean DIRTY! As in, I didn't know it was possible to get that dirty!! There were several hiccups in our camping trip that took a little fun out of my sails, but overall the kids had a blast and will hopefully remember this as a fun experience.

 Our campsite. We knew it was near a creek but we had no idea there was a rocky cliff on one side! Not fun when you have two very active little boys racing their cars around. We lost several cars over the cliff. Thankfully Daddy retrieved them all and we didn't lose a kid over the side!

 Jonah loved this dump truck (thanks Costco!) He collected every. single. rock. in our camp. Totally not kidding. And thankfully he dumped them all right outside the front door of our tent!

 One of his treasures.

 My manly dudes.

 Dan would go on daily stick collecting hikes. He took Jonah with him down the rocky cliff to collect some bigger sticks. Jonah was elated!!

 The boys did SO good sleeping in the tent. I was a bit worried. We didn't have room to pack the pack & play for Henry so we figured he'd either sleep with us or with Jonah. Well, we put him at one end of Jonah's inflatable bed and Jonah at the other and they slept perfectly!! I took a ton of blankets (it got SUPER cold at night) and they stayed snuggly warm!

 Every night we'd go down to the little village for showers. In order to beat the crowds, we usually went around 4. Obviously no one was going to bed at 4, and we didn't want the boys to run around in the dirt after they were clean. So we put them in the tent for the night with Dan's iPad! We had some fun Peppa Pig cartoons and a few Disney movies on it. This was a huge hit! We'd make dinner, bring the boys out to eat, put them back in the tent, clean up, then we'd all watch cartoons/movies and eat snacks before bed. It was my favorite part of each day!!

 Playing with toys and watching cartoons.

 One of the days, a deer came right through our camp! It nibbled on some plants and mosied through our camp! It wasn't sacred one bit! The boys LOVED this!

And we saw a few of these.  Not quite as fun and cute as the deer! This guy was right down our rocky cliff. Made me a little happy to have a rocky cliff in our camp! Thankfully, all the campers were very aware of bears and lots of people came into our camp to watch it. The boys were still in the tent so they didn't get to see it, which meant the bear didn't see them! It was actually fine, the bear just did it's bear thing and went away.