Fall camping . . . or is it summer?

When we arrived here at Levi Jackson state Park last Friday, it still felt like fall, and there was plenty of evidence of fall . . .

between the leaves on the ground, and the Halloween decorations all around, and the cool, crisp temperatures!  We actually thought they might be having their “Halloween Weekend” last weekend, but it turned out that this was just the week leading up to the big celebration . . . when everybody starts coming in and getting sites decorated and haunted houses set up!

There sure are lots of decorations getting set up!

Tom wasted no time at all in meeting our neighbors,

Ben, Carmen, Sarah, and Sarah’s friend, Madison, and soon the kids were playing cornhole together,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and Ben was introducing us to dutch oven cooking on the fire.  We sampled “Mountainman Breakfast” – a sausage, egg, hashbrown, cheese casserole, and “Cherry Pineapple Dump Cake”.  Both were really good, but I’m not sure I’ll be trading my convection microwave in for a cast iron dutch oven just yet!

Bryce and the girls (who are both also homeschooled, by the way) got along really well,

and they spent all day Saturday hanging out with Nick and a bunch of other kids in the campground – playing basketball, miniature golf, and looking for Sasquatch in the woods!!  (So tell Grandma she doesn’t need to worry about Bryce not finding kids to hang out with!)

There were even more teenagers around later, when a bunch of Carmen’s family joined them for the evening campfire.  After dinner and s’mores, the kids all took off to explore the cemetery trail after dark, while the adults enjoyed the toasty fire! 

They never found the cemetery, or Sasquatch, but they did find the 2 who got lost (not mine – don’t worry, Grandma!!), and the resident “lion-dog”!!

It turned out that his name was “Duke” and he lives in a house not far from the campground and likes to make daily rounds.  He sure looked ominous, but he was really a gentle dog who liked everybody.

He really did look like a ion, and that’s apparently his normal haircut – not a Halloween costume!

The weekend went really quick, and on Sunday our new friends left for home.

We went to church in London, and then did a little shopping before coming back to the campground.  Tom finally found a store that had the little Craftsman compressor that he’s been looking for, and he picked up a small shop vac, too.

This one works a lot better on Nick’s carpet than our little Dirt Devil hand vac did, and since the central vac hose doesn’t reach the garage, he needed something!

While I worked on the boys’ schedules for this week, Tom and Nick cleaned out and reorganized the storage compartment (and sold Tom’s old big compressor on the side of the road!), and Bryce found a new friend to hang out with.  Luke is 13, home-schooled also, and likes basketball as much as Bryce does.  He’s got an older sister and brother, as well as several younger brothers, so Nick has had somebody to hang out with, as well.  In fact, after we had our dinner of pizza pies on the fire last night, they all went down to the basketball court quite a while.

Today we’re not doing too much . . . school and work took awhile, so we decided to wait until tomorrow to go visit Cumberland Falls.  Tom & Nick are taking care of some errands – post office, diesel for the truck, filling a propane tank, and getting me quarters for the laundry – and Bryce is down at the basketball court.  The weather has taken a turn for the wonderful . . . plenty of sunshine and temps in the upper 70s . . . and it’s supposed to stay like this for several more days!  We can definitely live like this!!