Camping - with all the bells & whistles included

After a very long debate about what to do this past weekend, we loaded the car with all our camping gear and headed out to Colorado - Monument Lake and Cuchara to be exact. Sounds lovely right?

For the most part, it was a nice trip. Our main purpose to was to escape the 100 degree heat we've been experiencing at home...mission accomplished! The highest it got up there was 87 I think. Very nice! The scenery was wonderful - right on the edge of some good-sized mountains, wonderful pine trees, great lakes!

The biggest part of my trip...I caught my first fish! It wasn't a biggie. Actually, it was pretty small, but at least I FINALLY got to experience the thrill of catching one. It really was a thrill, too. I loved it. As The Husband said, I'm now officially "hooked". Poor joke, I know. I don't do the killing & cleaning part though...that's why The Husband was there, right? HA! After the fish was officially dead, we set it down while we threw a few more casts. The Wee One saw it and rather than messing with it (good girl!), she came to tell me it was "Fish...sleep...nite, nite." Love it!

So, with all this cool stuff going on, what could be bad? HA! Here we go...
1. While Little Einsteins are cool and all, I can only take so much. On the bright side, The Wee One's vocabulary now includes: "mission", "pat", "clap", "explore", and various other words that she repeats as the show plays.

2. The wind was freakin' ridiculous! For some reason, even in the mountains, the wind likes to blow and twist around me. Hum...tolerable if it weren't so dry and dusty. Oh well. The car needed a full cleaning (inside and out) anyway. : )

3. Managed to catch something in our back tire. Didn't have a blow-out - thank goodness, but tore it up enough on the side that we had to get a brand new one! Keep in mind, we just replaced all 4 tires about 3 weeks ago. Humph!

4. We were in bear country. No big deal right? Clean up your area, don't leave food out, no problem. Wrong. We did all that and still managed to get a curious visitor around midnight on our last night there.

Yeah, that might have been the coolest/scariest thing of the trip. Bears are so cute - even in the silhouette against the tent. However, it scared the poop out of us. We had all been asleep and The Wee One started to whimper from her little baby tent (it is in the big tent with us, but it is her sleeping space). I patted her back and she went back to sleep. I think it was God's way of making sure we were mildly awake for the next bit.

About 5 minutes after that (might have been longer - who knows), The Husband pops his head up and yells at me "There's a bear! I'm not *bleep*, there's a bear in our campsite!" The yell is almost a whisper, but you could tell there was real feeling behind it. I pop up and see bright lights and then...the cute little silhouette. Yikes! There's a bear in our campsite!!!

There was a large group of people camping a little way down from us and I guess they had been up talking and saw the bear come down from the woods. They had their car lights on it and were yelling at it to scare it away. Glad they did. That's what woke us up. The Husband jumped up and started hitting his fishing knife against the table in our tent. Black bears typically scare easily and I guess it worked because we couldn't see him. After a while, The Husband decided to check outside. I will admit, I was not super keen on this idea. However, he put on his super sexy head lamp and headed out. The people from down below came to talk to him and as far as anyone could tell, the bear decided to head back to the woods. Good.

While he was gone, I gotta say, The Husband and I didn't sleep all that well the rest of the night. I couldn't even bring myself to use my full air mattress. I slept on the side farthest away from the tent wall, just to be safe. : ) We moved The Wee One's little tent away from the tent wall as well. I finally crashed, but for a good while, every little movement made me jump. Crazy.

We love to camp, so we will be back out there this summer. I just don't think it will be in official bear country next time. Bears: 1...Campers: 0