Georgia Camping Adventure

Since having kids we have only tent camped once. It was fun but didn't turn out quite as we had hoped. You can read about it here. Now that the kids are a bit older we thought that we would give camping a second try. Thankfully, when we moved to Georgia, my sweet sister bought us this book. It was the perfect book for us to find a nice place to camp and explore. After a quick flip though we found our place. The camp seemed perfect, less than 2 hours away, on a lake and free! The only catch is that it was rustic, no water, no flush toilets, and no power.



This was our site. The Spanish moss gave it a fun creepy feeling, like the swamp monster episode of Scooby Doo.



We had a beautiful site and our very own swamp monster! Look carefully. Avery and Alia were very excited to see a wild alligator.



I'm pretty sure he wanted to eat Maia because he kept swimming by and watching her. Luckily he stayed in the water. We have heard of bears attacking people in tents and started to wonder if this guy was waiting for us to go to bed to get us. Luckily we were not the casualty of the first ever alligator tent attack.



There were actually two alligators. Here Brandee and Alia check out the little one.



And here is the big one.

We picked this campground not only because it was free and on the lake but because it was only a couple miles from one of Georgia's most unfamous state parks "The Grand Canyon of Georgia" (Providence canyon state park). In Georgia, that means the big ditch that was caused by farmers not being able to keep our barren soil from eroding. After 150 years of uncontrolled erosion you have this.



That's a big ditch.

It was actually a ton of fun. The washout was 150' deep and created 9 separate slot canyons. We spent the afternoon exploring a couple of them.



We had a lot of fun exploring all of the nooks and crannies of the canyon. Alia kept running around looking up saying "Oh, coooooaaaal" It was fun watching them explore.



After a brief rest, we were ready for more exploring.

After all of that exploring we came back, made a fire, ate dinner and made a bunch of smores.



For future reference, 3 jumbo smores are too many for a 2 or 5 year old.



This is how to take a bath when at camp. Alia loved it. We kept them up late thinking that they would be so tired that they would fall asleep fast. The 3 smores had a bit more influence than we thought. They bounced off the tent walls for what seemed like hours. Tent camping was fun though. We had a full moon and fell asleep to the sound of two owls calling to each other.

I think camping is back on our agenda, especially now that fall is here and being outside feels so good. Georgia just got a little cooler.