Our little camping trip.

If you know my husband, you know he loves to camp.  I guess that goes back to his Boy Scout days.  Peter likes to camp too.  So typically when there is any camping done in our family, it's the boys.  And when they camp the girls stay home, get mani/pedis, go out to dinner, and sleep in our own comfortable beds.

Dan has been talking about going camping as a family for ages.  And I finally said, "Fine, we can go but you are going to have to plan it because I have no idea where to start."   Thanks to Covid-19 Dan has some extra vacation days so on Friday we headed to the Linville Gorge located in the Pisgah National Forest.

There's a place near the gorge that has camping sites located on a very bumpy dirt road (Old N 105) along the gorge.  There are pull-offs (or spaces they have created to pull your car off the road into the woods.) These pull-offs are located along this road randomly depending on the conditions of the woods.  There are no reservations and it's first come first served. (You can also camp in the gorge but that requires a very long hike down into the gorge with all of your camping equipment.  Dan would have loved to do that but I told him he would need a new wife for that.)

Luckily we found a space and the area in the woods around it was nice.  PLEASE NOTE: this is literally camping in the woods - not a campground so there were no facilities.  And this is exactly what Dan wanted.

We got all of our gear unpacked, pitched our tents, gathered wood from the forest to help start the fire (we did bring some real firewood that we did not have to find and chop ourselves but needed kindling), and then took a quick hike to Wiseman's View Scenic Overlook to check out the gorge.

Then we came back and made dinner.  We cooked hotdogs over a little camp stove and they were delicious.  I was starving and the hotdogs hit the spot.  Then we got to work making the fire because Sarah wanted to make s'mores.

We sat around the fire all evening, talking, tending the fire, and eating s'mores.  It was really nice family time - no phones, no tvs, no distractions.

We went to sleep around midnight and were up around 7:30. We let the kids sleep until 8:30. We made coffee and had pop tarts (I guess we could have brought eggs and bacon but that seemed like a lot of work!) And our camp stove is tiny so breakfast would have been complicated.

After breakfast, we broke the camp down and took another quick hike to see the waterfalls.  However, it was starting to rain so we didn't go to the main lookout spot because it was further away.  Plus for 10:30 in the morning, the trails were already very crowded.

I would like to point out here that we were really roughing it!  As I mentioned, there were no facilities which is code for NO TOILET.  So we made our own camp toilet.  Dan cut the bottom out of a 5-gallon paint bucket and we purchased a $6 toilet seat from Lowes.  And taaaaaadaaaaaaa:

So we had all the comforts of home!  Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

Here are some pictures from our 24-hour camping adventure: