Bodega Dunes

Hooray, it is July! Our family has been looking forward to the month of July for, well, months! Ez is so busy with work and has had such a crazy schedule this past year that it has helped to make it through knowing that Dad is on vacation the month of July!

Okay, not really and completely. One thing I have learned about the Highway Patrol and the men that work for it and love what they do...they are never 100% on vacation! While Ez "technically" has the month off, he still is at work tonight, and will most likely go in once a week to help with one of the programs that he runs. Ez is also in charge of the new officers that come in after graduating the academy, so he spends their first week on the job with them--I believe that is the third week of July, but he will be home in the evenings. He also has a two day teaching commitment, but that is down in San Diego and we will be tagging along for that one! So you see, we are on vacation, but not free and clear!

We started our family vacation out with a very fun trip to Bodega Dunes, which is a campground near Bodega Bay. Yes, this was our very first family camping trip. Up until now, our big adventures always included accommodations in a hotel or a vacation house! We actually bought our tent and sleeping bags with wonderful intentions about 3 years ago, yet have never managed to use them outside of the annual father-son camp out! We decided it was time. Evie is walking and the kids are all old enough, right?

Getting ready for this trip was bigger than I had imagined--simply trying to remember everything we were going to need was more detailed than I am used to for a family trip! Loading up the car was an adventure in and of itself! We were quite literally stuffed. We actually didn't bring all of our folding chairs or Evie's portable high chair due to complete lack of space. Cute little Lily didn't even have space to have her legs sit down--she pretty much had an ottoman of pillows on top of the portable crib the entire trip. We had wanted to bring Duke, so we took out one of the seats and made a space for him, and even Duke was a bit squished! We were glad the car ride was only 1 1/2 hours!

We got to the camp site and started scoping out a site. We needed to find one with space for our large tent and a bit of space to play, preferably not too far from a bathroom. We found a spot, nice and large, really sandy (due to the fact that we were on the dunes). We got the kids out, tied up Duke and went to work assembling the tent. It was getting hot, the sun was beating on us, the sand was burning our feet. I had set up the portable crib because I didn't want Evelyn to walk in all the hot sand while we were getting the tent up. It was finally up and we looked around and realized--there was simply no shade! We were going to end up hanging out in the tent the entire time because it was going to be too sunny and the ground would burn the kids. SO, Ez and David took a little drive to scope out a better site. They came back, we all loaded up and headed to the new site where the boys had dropped some things off to "claim" our new site (the tent still is up at the first site, mind you). We get there and it happens to be near an area they were doing some work on and water was started to drift closer to the camp site. So we drove on to try to find yet a 3rd site to drop off some more of our stuff! We finally came upon a great site--nice and large, really shaded, and it just so happened to have no sand and be directly across from a bathroom! We unloaded and then sent Ez and David to claim our stuff from the other 2 sites. In the end, it took us about 3 hours and 3 different sites to set up camp instead of 1, but we really loved our site.

The rest of the trip was fun--we spent time at a few different beaches. They were all rather rocky and not sandy, but I actually preferred that for Evie--it was easier for her to play in. We collected shells, investigated tide pools, ran with Duke. We played games (Clue, Uno and Yahtzee), catch, Frisbee. We roasted marshmallows in search of the perfectly roasted one, ate tons of smores, told fun stories around the camp fire, made lots of camp fires, and made friends with some fellow campers. We had no rules about food, so there were the occasional Hershey bars after a bowl of cereal, or the 5 marshmallows and Oreo's prior to lunch, but that is what camping is all about!

The weather was far cooler than we expected and luckily I had packed enough to keep the kids and mom warm. Dad packed a pair of shorts, a pair of jeans, t-shirts, a sweatshirt, and sandals. Not even socks! Luckily Ez is tougher than me, I would have been SO cold!

Our last night camping we all sat around the fire and told our favorite parts of camping and had a really sweet little testimony meeting, which, by the way, is at the top of some of my favorite parts of the trip!

We had a really great time and look forward to finding another fun spot again, perhaps even before the summer is up!

I took far too many photos, and here are just a few!