Home after our 7th camping trip

Camping under a blooming Sakura Tree (not the most
luxuriant of sakura, but nonetheless).

We're home again from our camping trip! I'll give you a fuller account tomorrow (I know there are some of you out there who love to hear about our camping trips), but for now, some positives, negatives and photos.

Negatives

David's learnt a lot about campfire making.
This was our 7th camping trip as a family
(on our own) and I think we've found a good
rhythm.

1. By far the biggest–city traffic was awful and caused a 150 km journey to take over 5 hrs each way.
2. Much less of a concern, but still—in the fairly primitive showers, I managed to wet my sneakers on the first night. Thankfully I had a pair of crock-imitations (that are slightly too short) and that I had the presence of mind to put my sneakers near the fire at breakfast so they dried quickly.

Positives

The beach.

1. Full family (95%) cooperation in set-up and other jobs at camp.
2. Thursday morning we just hung around camp and everyone found things to keep them occupied. This is a first and something I dreamed about when thinking about camping with a family. Actually this attitude prevailed the whole camp, David and I didn't feel presumed upon to provide entertainment for the crowd and so got to relax ourselves. Wonderful!
3. Open fire with free firewood. We had a lot of fun with our first open fire while camping (most campsites don't allow this). Much entertainment from this simple thing. Including sitting around it for hours yesterday afternoon-evening, singing, reading a couple of chapters of our latest book, reading the Bible and praying. Wonderful memories.
4. Beach. While not a beach quite up to golden sand Australian beaches, it was fairly clean and the boys had a heap of fun there. It was only a 5 minute drive from our camping spot.
5. Not crowded campsite, so we had a large section of flat to spread out and play. The boys kicked soccer ball around, and played badminton. They also built a "shelter" out of the free wood (and put it all back this morning).
6. Camping under sakura (cherry blossoms). I thoughts we'd largely missed the cherry blossoms, as they were looking great on Saturday, but we had no energy to manage going out to see them.



We cooked rice over the fire in our
new Japanese rice cooker. Worked a treat!

7. Good weather. It rained much of our trip over, but the rain cleared before we got there. Additionally it wasn't too cold.

Is that enough?