Camping With The Family
As soon as I was able to get home from work, I began packing my truck in preparation for heading to our family property near Warsaw, Missouri. Our children have been wanting to go camping for some time now. We had just enough time to spend one night under the stars and do a little fishing Saturday morning. Upon arriving at the land we set up camp and worked on getting our campfire going for dinner. The tent in the bed of the truck is the Napier Sportz Truck Tent 57 Series. There are several different models available for all styles and sizes of trucks. This tent is great for anyone like me who has a hard time getting up off of the ground. You can learn more about this tent on the product review page here.
The fire starters made by following the instructions in the post "Simple Homemade Fire Starters" worked out great! It only required one to get it going. The one bit of advice I'd give here is to make sure that the fire starter is positioned between a couple of twigs on end as it will ignite and burn much better than if it is laying flat.
Our Adjust-A-Grill worked great over the open fire for cooking potatoes and smoked sausage in pie pans. Dinner turned out to be delicious! As you can see from the picture below the kids were having a time relaxing next to the fire. As always, our ThermaCell Mosquito Repellant device kept the pesky critters at bay while we sat around the campfire and ate our meal. If you don't have one you really should pick one up. They're only about 25 dollars and they really work wonders on the mosquitos. As long as you aren't fighting off ticks - you won't even need to bother with a spray type repellent.
We finished our meal and played a little catch with the baseball before having S'mores and retiring to bed. After a grueling week of work, it didn't take long before I was sawing logs. I guess I should say sorry to any of the neighbors that might have been startled awake from my snoring as I'm quite certain it was noisy.....lol
After sleeping in a bit we woke up, cleaned up our campsite, ate some breakfast and headed to the public fishing docs below the Truman Lake Dam. It was rather windy which may have affected the fishing.....they were barely biting. We fished for a few hours before heading back home. Below is a picture of the best crappie caught. My wife reeled that one in..... what can I say..... She had a really good teacher ;-)
This crappie was twelve and a half inches long. There are some bigger ones being caught down there this year, but this one isn't too bad by my standards. We will definitely be taking more journeys to our property this summer. Hopefully they will be a bit longer than 24 hours. Although it was a whirlwind trip, there is something relaxing about getting away for a while. Life can sometimes get in the way of taking extended trips so you just have to squeeze a short one in here and there whenever you get the chance!
- Any day in the outdoors is a good day!