Camping again

This past weekend found us camping out at the Bruneau Sand Dunes.   It was really quite fun and a relatively short drive to the park.  We arrived early enough to pick a nice campground with some shade, there is not a lot of trees there.  We unpacked the kids and began setting up a tent.  As we were setting up the tent the only other campers there at the moment showed up and asked if we'd already paid for our spot.  When you pay for this camping spot you put your money into a big basket thing that the parks people pick up later, so if someone had paid for a spot and left without leaving any proof that they are camping there, it's basically free game.  The husband looks at his wife and says, "Well that just Great!"  I felt kind of bad but oh well, we referred to him as grumpy for the rest of the trip.

When we first got to the park we stopped in at the visitors center.  Inside they had a lot of animals and birds stuffed and moving around as if they were real.  They had a Golden Eagle feeding her babies a dead bunny.  The kids were full of questions, what happened to the bunny, why is it dead.  I tried to explain to them that the birds need bunnies like we need meat or cow.  Yeah it didn't click but it was fun.

After setting up the camp site we just sat around while the kids ran.  It was surprisingly hot.  After dinner we headed up to the sand dunes, unfortunately we forgot sled but we still had fun.  We parked and the kids raced off to the mountain of sand.

They ran up part of the hill and then I noticed them crawling up the hill.

I realized that they may just need my help and couldn't figure out why I thought these two little ones should go on their own.  So I headed up after them.

I stared walking up after them and realized why they were crawling.  It was hard to climb up and have your feet sinking into the ground while you did this.  By the time I reached Chas I was really thinking I should of brought some water.  It felt like I was breathing in sand.

We finally made it to the top.  It was really really cool.  I felt like Lawrence of Arabia while we walked the ridge across the top of the sand mountain.

I tried to get the kids to walk down the ridge instead of going straight back down the hill.  It just seemed very steep to me.

 It was really fun to say the least.  I think at this point scooter was trying to figure out what the heck we were up to.

Once we were down we hiked over the the astronomy area.  The parks has a huge telescope that you can look at the stars.  They also have a pair of Navy binoculars that you could look through.  I wasn't able to see anything but clouds through the large telescope but the binoculars were awesome.  We were able to see the moon and it was so neat to see it three-dimensional.  We also moved the binoculars over the the sand dunes and watched people hike.  The kids could focus on them easier then the moon.  It was just really cool.  Unfortunately we didn't get to see any stars so we headed back to our camp.

When we got back a ton more scouts had showed up and were playing football by us.  I laughed and thought it was a good thing grumpy didn't camp where we were camping because of the kids.  I asked Jay when he thought the kids would quiet down, he said around 11pm.  He was right.  Luckily I was so tired it didn't matter.