Home Sweet Home

Blue Ridge Reservoir & Dam On Sunday we tried to do more things alone as family since we weren't going to church. We took a drive about 30 minutes away from camp to Blue Ridge Reservoir. I had never ventured past the first parking lot, but it turns out if you pass the first parking lot and follow the bumpy road for another mile you reach the dam. We hiked around it and down the canyon behind it and it was just beautiful! I've never seen a spillway before either and that was cool to see as well. The reservoir is huge, this is just a small portion of it behind us. The spillway. See all the trees? There are hundreds more just floating in the water behind the spillway just waiting for a huge rain to make things start flowing!  Cool blue-bellied lizard Dale must be smiling cuz he's got the best gig around! The canyon behind the dam was just gorgeous This excursion took place on our hottest day camping, stopping to cool off our feet in the COLD water was a great ...

Kinder Springs Tire Swing When I was younger there was a swing tied to a tree on the side of a hill up here at Kinder Springs. It used to keep all of us occupied for hours! It was awesome because the slope it was on made you feel super high off the ground when you'd swing out away from the tree (My oldest brother Dean actually fell off of it one year and broke his arm and busted his forehead open) . Long ago the rope broke and the tree eventually fell over, but several years back someone tied a rope to an Oak tree in the meadow and the fun continues! Brighton fell off of it this year but luckily didn't break any bones. It did leave him with a big bruise on his back though! You can see in this picture why Justin was the favorite "pusher" Dirty faces are definitely okay at Kinder Springs! My attempt at a "super push." Basically it looks like I lifted my legs off the ground and off to the side to give the illusion of flying in the air. Let's face it ...

Kinder Springs! Adaira with her wildflower bouquet We made our annual camping trip to Kinder Springs this year a couple weeks ago. Man I love this place! Looking at these pictures just makes me want to be back there. My family (Ellsworths) have been going to Kinder Springs ever summer for over three decades. When I was younger we would camp for an entire 2 weeks at a time. I have such great memories of this place; you know those places that make you feel nostalgic from all the childhood memories you have there? That is what Kinder Springs is for me. We only camped for four days, but one day when the kids are older I hope to make it a little longer (hopefully at least a week at a time). The weather was pretty great with lots of rain, though on the one day we didn't have rain it was pretty hot, high eighties to low nineties at least, too hot for a little guy like Dale to take his nap in either the tent, camper or car! Dale was not quite ready to be a good camper this year. Our ot...

Summertime fun. It is just too hot to do anything fun outside that doesn't involved water, and since we are on the 10 year plan for our pool, the best we've got in the summer time $20 slip'n'slide. We've had it out so much recently that the kids were starting to get bored of it and hardly ever wanted to go outside. Meanwhile I'm going crazy having them inside and feeling guilty about all the TV their watching so I decided to change things up a bit. I moved the slide from the flat grass to our little ramp (with foam pads underneath) and the kids LOVED it since it gave them so much more momentum. It was so hot I even went down a few times with my clothes on. Half way into it we added our little playslide to the top of the slip'n'slide to give them even more speed. I think they played outside for a good 2 hours! While they played I got to to clean & spray off the patio while trying to keep Dale from eating dead bugs or falling off the patio steps. Som...

Conductor Brighton. Brighton is our little train conductor. He rigged up this little contraption and had us tie it together one night. The next day he was pushing everyone along on his train. He has told us before that he wants to be a train conductor one day. His mom told him she would miss him since train conductors go so far away on the trains. He changed his mind and said he didn't want to be a train conductor because he would miss his family. Later on he changed his mind again and told us not to worry because he would come visit us on Christmas. Cheers from the caboose. Down in front!   Fortunately Dale has only fallen out of this contraption once, err...twice, uhhh....hey! Look how cute Adaira's hair is in the last picture! In fact Brighton made his own commercial about his train. In fact he did a pretty good job talking about it. In fact he just may actually make a million bucks someday.

After years of owning our little Canon PowerShot we finally figured out the Digital Marco function which lets one take close up shots. These were taken during our camping trip to Kinder Springs (which will be detailed in a forth coming post.)