Category Archives: travel

what i did during summer vacation

what i did during summer vacation

0913swim2Summer is over. Where did it go? It wasn’t spent here, as you can tell by the complete lack of posts.

A lot of it was spent in the swimming pool, wearing that same Lands’ End swimsuit that has lasted me three summers and is still going strong.

A tiny bit of it was spent on our fourth night away from children in EIGHT YEARS. Real clothing! Hotel! Being out in the dark!

0913hotelwaveA large part of it was spent driving, and driving, and driving. We drove from Kansas City to Colorado, Utah, California, Arizona and back. We camped a lot. We saw friends and family whom we love and miss every day. We saw mountains and arches and canyons and the OCEAN!

0913arches 0913crystalcoveI managed to fire some platters.

0913dashplatterI finished this custom wall platter. I’m still trying to decide whether I want to do this sort of custom work regularly.

0913houseplatterAnd there was so much more. Family came to visit. Two of my girls learned to ride bicycles. One of them jumped off the high dive! Two had birthdays. I had a birthday. Chris had a birthday. We have another birthday coming in a couple of weeks.

All the girls are in school — preschool for one, elementary for two, and college for me. I am back in school, taking graphic design classes again. I haven’t had time to touch clay in a month, and that makes me sad. It has been kind of insane trying to keep up with the kids, the house, the dog, the cooking, the shopping, the bills, the laundry, the dishes AND go to school. There’s no room for clay. So I don’t know what to do about that.

I should perhaps make some choices, but if I know myself, I’ll just keep trying to choose everything.

a-camping we will go

a-camping we will go

IMG_3547We are planning on doing some camping this summer, so we recently purchased a tent! Our old tent was ruined in the great flood of 2010, and it wouldn’t have held five people anyway.

We were all pretty excited about the tent, so we decided to do a test run in the living room. We moved the couches out of the way, but it was too big. We were whacking walls and windows and pictures with the poles. It’s giant. So, no tent in the living room. It caused great disappointment among the littles when we decided to wait and set it up outside the next morning.

The evening after we set up the tent, a big storm came in. The tent was subjected to lots of rain and strong winds, and it didn’t leak or tear! So I guess it is a pretty good tent for our purposes. (It’s the Coleman Montana 8 if you are wondering.)

I’ve been soliciting advice from friends and family about camping with kids, and everyone has been so helpful. Besides the usual kid-craziness, I think our biggest problem may be how to get all of our equipment in and on our car, which isn’t huge. I’m looking at either the Sherpak or the Rightline Saddlebag. I’ve even toyed with the idea of getting both.

Looking at camping equipment is so fun! It reminds me of Girl Scout camp, which I only attended once and was plagued by shyness the entire time. But the equipment? The canteens? The little metal cups? The name tags in your shirts? That stuff was great. (Can you tell I’m a camping novice?)

Do you have any camping tips?