Camping Fun

We took O on his inaugural camping trip this weekend.  We only stayed one night, but it was a BIG success.  Not surprisingly, he loved camping.  He was enthralled with the tent and the picnic table and especially the campfire.  I am very excited that O liked camping so much. It has been far too long since camped, and I realized how much I miss it.  

Since the only tents we owned were a very small one-person backpacking tent, and a slightly larger two-person backpacking tent, we decided to buy a bigger "car camping" tent.  This is our new camping palace:

The tent itself is not as big as the picture makes it look, there is an extended vestibule that we bought for it to provide a covered area outside the tent in an attempt to toddler-proof the inside.  O did pretty well with taking shoes off before going into the actual tent.  The biggest battle was getting him to not lean on the tent from the outside.  For some reason, that was very tempting.

We chose a walk-up site, so it was nice to not have any cars going by, although it did mean hauling all of our gear about 300 yards to the site.  Normally, 300 yards is not very far, but with O tagging along, it seemed to take forever on some of the trips.  

The campground is in a eucalyptus grover overlooking Lake Chabot in the Castro Valley.  Our site was nice and secluded from other sites, we did not have a view of the lake, but just over the hill from us, this was the view: 

Tom and O enjoyed some reading by the campfire:

O always loves eating at picnic tables.  Here we are at breakfast this morning:

Overall it was a great experience!  The park we stayed at is only about 40 minutes from or house to the campsites.  O went to bed really well and slept well in the tent.  He was excited, well behaved and "helpful" putting the tent.

Hurray camping!!!