Hi. I am back from my camping trip and want to thank Gary for the great blog posts he wrote while I was gone and also for his video on geocaching.

I am in the middle of unpacking and repacking because later today I am heading back out the door again for another camping trip, a 5 day one to Governor Dodge State Park in Wisconsin. I should be more excited about going than I am, especially considering I profess to love camping and write about it a lot in this blog, but I am tired and would like another few nights in my own bed before heading back out again instead of feeling like my house is just a supply replenishment station and a laundromat.

The trip I just got home from was fun, for the most part. I should have realized it was going to be noisy in the park when I read that campsites are being added. My favorite thing about the park we stayed at, Kohler-Andrae State Park in Wisconsin on the western shore of Lake Michigan, is the sound of the waves crashing into shore but all I heard during the day was construction vehicles.

Plus the combination of storms on the lake and hot humid days closed the beach to swimming a few days because of high levels of e-coli bacteria in the water so I couldn’t go swimming as much as I wanted to.

But, it was still fun. To me camping is like that fishing saying I see on bumper stickers, hats, and shirts, “A bad day fishing (replace fishing with camping) is better than a good day at work.”

Here are a couple of pictures from the trip. The first is of one of my nieces flying a kite; the second is “flamingo alley” at one of the campsites (that is only about half of the flamingos they had on their site - it was really cute!); and the third is of Lake Michigan at dusk on a very calm evening. The water was a really pretty turquoise and reminded me of tropical beaches such as those in the Caribbean.