Holiday Weekend

Pancake breakfast while camping

So Ryan was home for a nice four day weekend last week, we were super excited and planned on getting lots done in the garden and around the house.  The night he got home Lauren said she wanted to go to the beach (she must have gotten this from grandma), Ryan laughed and said the nearest beach was a long ways away.  The wheels in my head started turning though.  The next morning I received an email from an Indiana tourist site saying "Visit the Dunes! Your summer getaway!"  The pictured it showed looked like a pretty good beach to me and the dunes are only 4 hours away on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.  So I asked Ryan if he was up for a road drive/camping trip.  He said he was game, then I called my sister in Michigan to see if her and her family wanted to meet us and camp that night then go to the lake the next day.  For better or worse they dropped their plans for the evening and decided to join us.  A few hours later we were on the road. It was great to be able to visit with Sarah, Steven and Jacqui.  Lauren loves Jacqui and will follow her just about anywhere.  That night while we were camping Lauren and I saw fireflies for the first time, it was awesome.  Apparently it was so awesome that Lauren could sleep most the night. She tends to get more and more wound up the later it gets until finally she crashes.  Because of this Ryan helped calm her down in the tent and Rachel and I slept in the car.

The beach

The next day our little girl who was so excited to go to the beach got sand in her eyes withing the first hour of being there.  Within 30 minutes she had rubbed them so much that her eyes were red and puffy and she could barely she out of them. She was miserable and was crying about wanting to go home.  Since there wasn't a whole lot we could do there to get her cleaned up (everything was covered with sand and just made it worse) and she was obviously not going to enjoy being there, we left Sarah and Steven at the beach and headed home.  Our first stop of course being somewhere we could rinse out Lauren eyes and get the rest of her cleaned up. 

 Despite some craziness it was fun to get away and definitely worth the drive to see family and stick our feet in the water even if only for a few minutes :)