The Coswan's Blog....NOW News from the South: Updated (with pics) July Long Camping

The annual July Long Weekend camping trip took place this past week.....at the standard location, Long Lake. We've been doing a bit of a "family trip" for around 10 years now - started largely to spend a weekend with our families. The original rules of the weekend were that you had to bring your parents to spend the weekend with you....it wasn't as much about camping with the buddies - we typically have a lot of those, but it really became about spending time with your family - brothers, sisters, parents, and that usually combined a great group of friends that I've had for over 30 years. The other neat part is that most of our parents were good friends, so when we got them together, it meant that the "old group" from school was back together as well. And many of my friends parents have become second parents to me, so this weekend is a pretty special weekend for us all.

Our past trips have only been a 3 or 4 day trip, but with us making the trek from FMM South, we decided to make it a full week this time - and we've never done a week of camping with the kids. It started out with some smokin' hot weather (around +30 for the first 3 days with some minor storms in the late evenings), then tapered off around +20 for the rest of the week - perfect camping weather. Our stalls were less than 100m from the beach area, so pretty much every day involved a couple trips to the beach to play, splash, and cause general havoc. Kate even had her first tube ride - Tim's Dad had brought out the boat for us to use, so all the kids had quite a few hours of fun being towed behind the boat.

We also had Terry's dad Peter bring out the accordion - a first for this weekend's trips. He used to play in a band years ago, and along with Gord on the guitar, we had many hours of great entertainment and camp fire singing. There was even a point that Peter's two boys grabbed their wives and headed onto the road for a quick polka! We had more than a few folks popping by to view our site from the road, checking out exactly what was going on, and enjoying the tunes.