Trailmates at Yucaipa Regional Park

We haven't been camping with the Princesses/Trailmates in quite a while, so this was pretty fun. Oddly, in my 11 years in the program, we've never been to this particular campground. It's very civilized. In fact, too civilized -- the only way to get the girls off of their cell phones is to take them somewhere that there's no signal, but this place is really a "city park", so we had plenty of signal there. Oh, well -- taking their phones away is tantamount to torture.

We drove out on Friday at 3:30, so it took 2 hours to get out through Riverside and all. Sunday morning, we got home in only 1 hour. There were only 18 families there and there weren't a lot of planned activities, which is fine with me. And since Geneva's hurt foot is in one of those big plastic boots, she wasn't going anywhere far, either.

But I had her bring her violin, and we ran through some of her fiddle tunes in the afternoon. That was big fun, but she's all paranoid about bothering people with mistakes and/or playing the same song more than once or twice. But I think that every single dad told me at some point how cool that was, and how great she plays.

On Saturday evening, we had our traditional campfire, with skits and such. Three little girls had written a song about "My Dad" (something like: "Dads are stinky, Dads are gross, but my dad is pretty cool -- My dad, my dad, my dad *rocks*!" (Talk about playing to the crowd!)), to a set of two chords that one of them could remember from her guitar lessons. When it came time to do it, I offered to let her play it on my electric guitar, which went over pretty big -- with her, and her dad.

It started to sprinkle Sunday morning during breakfast, which got steadily stronger as we tore down the camp in record time. We all got into our cars just as it really started coming down, and we drove on home. I usually like to hang out as long as possible on Sundays, just to get my money's/hassle's worth, but with the rain we were home by 10:30, and that's OK too.

We're camping again (at the beach!) in 5 weeks, and then we might go on the Colorado River canoeing trip three weeks after that, depending on how I'm feeling about all this by then. The "front door" zipper on the tent that I bought 10 years ago is pretty well shot, but I'm figuring if I can just limp through these last two campouts, I might be out of the camping business entirely. I'm not sure how active we'll be next year -- we'll see.