Sunburns, boating, camp stoves and rain storms

The title of this blog about sums up my very first (and certainly not my last) camping trip! We arrived on Wednesday to find that we could check in about 5 hours early since the people who had our spot left early! We popped up the tent, unhooked the boat and headed down to the beach for some swimming. The campground had its own beach and boat launch as well as docks! The water was the perfect temperature and was surprisingly calm as we would come to find out over the course of our stay. After our swim we had two really bad rain storms so we drove around the park to check things out, we saw the Lodge and Cabins, the two marinas and studied the map to see what we wanted to do the next day. By the early evening the rain was gone and we took the boat out for some fishing and sunset watching!

That night we headed back and cooked some Jiffy Pop on the camp stove and a few hot dogs and went to bed. We decided that we really need a bigger tent.....and that maybe we didn't inflate the air mattress all the way!

Thursday we decided to check out some of the sites around the park and headed out in search of the Kennedy Stone House and Hosak's Cave.

This is the Kennedy Stone house which was at the other side of the park from where we camped. It was built in 1890 I believe and over the years was in bad disrepair so the park started a fund to fix the place up and I have to say they did an amazing job. We didn't get to go inside because it was only open for 3 hours in the afternoon and we didn't feel like going back.

Next we went to Hosak's Cave.....see those two "orbs" in the picture? We found out that two people had fallen and died at the top where that little waterfall is; one girl was 14 and the other 20. Someone told me that those orbs are ghosts and I didn't see them in any other picture from the trip. We couldn't go much further into the cave because they wanted people to keep out since its so dangerous but it was neat to see.

We took the boat out that afternoon, I got burnt and we didn't catch any fish but saw some interesting things like this island of pine trees, most of them were living in the water with their roots exposed, it was much prettier in person.

This morning there was a thick fog on the lake, it reminded me of that Stephen King movie, "The Mist" - we didn't catch any fish but the water was so calm and pretty and it was a great way to end our mini-vacation.