Funmurphys: the Blog

Alls Well That Ends Well

The weather this year has had an unusual pattern - nice weather on the weekend, lousy weather during the week. Normally it's the other way around, although last weekend the weather wasn't nice. I ought to know, I was out in it camping with the scouts again. I may have to keep going until we get a nice weekend. It could have been worse - the rain came after the tents were up on Friday night and we are safe and snug in our, err, sleeping bags. It seems to be a tradition that we pitch our tents in the dark, which leads to surprises in the morning -- our worse, in the night.

Here the new scouts are getting instruction from the Senior Patrol Leader the night we arrived:

Read on for more fun filled photos and exciting adventures...

Those home improvement shows have designers always going on about bringing the outdoors in. Well, look at a picture of the scouts kitchen and tell me if we succeeded or not:

What's cooking? Pancakes? I think those are more like fried dough balls, but good!

We were at Pere Marquette state park, and this is the Boy Scouts, so we hiked. We came across a tree recently blown over right on the trail (yes, we did manage to get through):

Along the way every now and then you could glimpse the river and its plain through the trees:

Eventually we made our way to the twin shelter, which was a nice place to rest and admire the view:

Although the site itself was gorgeous:

But that wasn't our ultimate destination, just a waystop along the way. So we pressed on, upward, onward, excelsior! At last we made it to McAdam's Peak and the view from there is quite nice:

This park is famous for the Bald Eagles you can see in winter, but we weren't there in the winter. So it was back down to the visitor's center via the ravine trail (I'm glad we went down it, not up it):

That night we had a fire - and there are few things nicer than a fire on a cold spring night (especially when you don't have to help gather the wood):

The weekend was exceptionally windy, which made the cold much worse. Several of the tents were blown over, including mine. Here we are Sunday morning making ready to leave. That's my tent on it's side - I tipped it over to dry the underside which was still wet from the night before:

The drive alongside the rivers home was pretty, and the bridge at Alton is a sight worth seeing all on its own. But the best part was the long hot shower at journey's end.