Car Camping S24O at John Bryan

Is it still an S24O if you drive?

Over break, the kids and I loaded up the Civic and headed to John Bryan SP for an overnighter. My idea was to take the twins on an introductory mountain bike trip to the very easy trails at JB, and to enjoy camping.

Only one of those ideas mostly worked out.

Turns out it was easier to load four bikes and four people into my Civic, rather than our much larger Pilot:

The playground was our first stop after checking in:

 Then it was on to the mountain bike trail:

We made it only a few hundred yards down the very smooth, wide, and easy arboretum trail before the whining was enough for me. "Too tired! Too hard!" Kate has many athletic abilities, but apparently bike riding is not one of them.

So it was back to our site to set up camp:

I brought two small hatchets. Good thing, as they provided most of the entertainment at camp:

We took a break from camp and headed to Young's Jersey Dairy for a snack:

and a little more playing, but more whining, this time from Henry. "Can we go yet?"

Back to camp to work on our hot dog sticks. More sharp object, no one hurt. Success!

Henry was hot, so he cooled off with a wet towel... once we found the single working water faucet:

My 2nd one match campfire:

It's pretty easy when you start with dry, split 2x4s and newspaper.

We were camped under a buckeye tree, so the kids spent some time splitting the stinky nuts:

My brother and nephews stopped by for s'mores after dinner. The kids enjoyed playing with their cousins for a few hours. After dinner, we had a few visitors around the campfire:

We also watched these ants attack a much larger centipede. Such is our entertainment out in the wild:

The next morning, Kate and I got into a big argument over the restrooms. She wouldn't use the park's bathroom, because there were too many flies around (even after I emptied most of a can of bug spray into the bathroom). And she wouldn't go outside. I finally gave up and drove her into town to use a restroom. She was all smiles and grace after that, but it will be a while before I take her camping again.

Cleaning up the tent Thursday morning, we found this cool walking stick bug:

Then we retreated to the shelter house as heavy rains rolled in. After several hands on Uno, we had wasted enough time that we were able to head to Dayton for lunch. Of course it was at Cici's:

Everyone was happy campers here!