Backyard Camping

Ben and Gail and I went camping the other night...being that it's essentially the last weekend of the summer, we were worried about finding a good spot, and since we also wanted to bring Miles along, we camped in the woods behind out house (we have 20 acres, and adjoin 10,000 acres of state forest preserve, so it's woodsy)...


Ben and I built a nice fire for cooking and roasting (hot dogs followed by marshmallows)...a nice hot fire that burned down to perfect coals...


We enjoyed watching the night come to our backyard, and feeling the temperature drop from a daytime high around 80 down to about 36 by the next morning...


Miles helped Gail cook her hot dog on a stick...the grill was a nice bonus for searing the dogs or browning the rolls...


Ben loves poking the fire...either a genetic inheritance or just part of being a boy...


I took this art-y shot to showcase Gail's marshmallow roasting technique...she scorches the outer layer, peels it off, and then cooks the next layer in...


Ben likes roasting them 2 at a time...


I am better able to handle the pressure if I just stick to roasting one at a time...


Miles was trying to talk me into giving him the sticks that we used to cook the dinner and dessert...he was very well behaved during the whole trip...


As it got cooler, and he mellowed (getting used to the fire and food and such) he lay down on one of the fleece blankets that we brought for him...

He's so handsome!

Important Note: Cedar was invited on this outing as well, and chose instead to catch up on sleep in the house, on the couch and bed...



As the night came on the beauty and colors of the fire seemed to intensify...it was, as always, hypnotic and magical...we could hear the daysounds end and the nightsounds begin in the woods all around us...


As the stars came out, the cold came on a bit more, and we enjoyed the feeling of contrast between the fireside and nightside of our bodies...it was a clear night with a nice, fat, yellow moon...


Gail read to Ben by the fire for a while before heading out to our campsite out in the woods...


In this pic, you can see Gail's and Ben's hammocks, as well as Miles' fleece-bed between the two...Once we were settled in, Gail read a few more chapters by headlamp before calling it a night...we were interrupted a couple of times by really loud coyote singing coming from not too far away through the trees...


Here you can see my hammock in relation to theirs...Ben and I had found a nice grouping of trees in a partial-clearing left by a big storm last winter...it allowed us to hang close to each other, and to have enough open space to get a nice view of the sky and stars and moon...


Gail in her hammock, snuggly and warm (until the chilly morning hours)...


Ben in a balaclava, with a book in case of early-morning wake-ups...

Gail and I heard lots of animals during the night while Ben slept...yips and yowls, branches cracking and random crashing through the brush...both nearby and right in the midst of our hammocks...after a while of this, Miles was being driven crazy, so I brought him back up to our house, where he and Cedar slept the rest of the night away...in our bed...

This was Gail's first time sleeping in a hammock, and first time camping in years, so it was both a treat and a trial...a good time was had by all, and we will definitely be camping in our woods again this Fall...