"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life last. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter." -Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

 

We had our first summer camping trip the first week of June. We went up to Rice MN for the MSAA State Target and 50-meter shoots extended the trip for a couple more days and visited some State Parks. 

We started our trip at Twin Rivers Campgrounds in Royalton, MN. I picked it because it was about 9 miles from the shot venue. Twin Rivers is an RV park/campground. If you are a family with kids you would love it. They have tubing, mini golf, a pool, and a huge bounce pad. It is not the kind of campground that I would usually pick. Overall we had a good experience while staying there. 

We had a very nice campsite right on the Mississippi River. Rick was very excited that he could do a little shoreline fishing. 

Enjoying the river view. 

Rick did awesome at the shoots, placing on both days. 

 Morgan was happy to spend the day sleeping in my shirt rather than watch Rick shoot. 

On Sunday after Rick finished shooting we made our way to Mille Lacs Kathio State Park. When I was trying to decide which park we should go camping at next I almost picked Kathio. I am so glad I did not! We stopped there on our way to our final destination to hike the hiking club trail and check the park out. I am not a mosquito baby, I live in Minnesota so we all know that if it is summer we have mosquitos. But l think this is the worst place I have ever been for mosquitos! 

When I put on my bug tamer jacket Rick made fun of me. He asked if I was expecting armageddon. Well after about a half mile into the trail, I was the one who was not getting eaten alive by mosquitos.  

The trail was pretty with lots of hills. 

We saw a couple swans in one of the many ponds along the trail. 

We hiked the trail in record time. Even the dogs were moving along fast. 

We would like to go back and explore the park but not until after the first frost....

Next, we were on to our final destination for the trip, Father Hennepin State Park Father Hennepin is right on Malle Lacs Lake. 

When we got to the park and I checked in I told the women in the office that we had just come from Kathio State Park and had done the hiking club trail. Her response was oh that's a hard trail and the mosquitos are awful there because of all the swampy land in the park. It really made me laugh. 

The park has two campgrounds, one on the lake and one a short way away from the lake.  When we got to our site we realized that it was very uneven. We tried and tried to level the van but it was not going to happen. By then we were both tired and hungry so we just parked it for the night and decided we would deal with it in the morning. 

Once we got settled in we discovered the wood tics 😬 The dogs were covered with them from our earlier hike.  I am not exaggerating when I say we picked at least 30 of them off of the dogs!!! They were everywhere! Rick also found several on him. I did not find a single one on me. But I figured my bug tamer jacket helped and I had sprayed myself with Deet before we went on our hike. 

Poor Otis had had enough of us pulling tics off of him. Every time I looked I would find another one. Thank goodness I had treated the dogs with Frontline for the last two months so I knew the tics we did not find would die. I was more concerned with them making their way onto Rick and me. 

Well, morning came and I was tic-free and found another 10-15 dead tics in the van. 

We had some breakfast and then got on our bikes and biked back to the park office. The wonderful DNR worker let us change sites. 

We went from an electric site to a non-electric site but we were fine with that because we were now right by the lake. It was a great site. And best of all we had little to no mosquitos. We have discovered that we can get along just fine with no electricity for a few days. We have solar panels to charge everything up in the camper. If we need to use something like the microwave we can fire up the generator. We try not to use the generator because it is noisy and I hate to bother others in the campgrounds. 

We had so much fun over the next two days. We did some hiking, biking, fishing and best of all relaxing. 

So even with all of our troubles on the trip, we had a great time. You just have to laugh it off when something doesn't go as planned. In the end, we ended the trip in a wonderful park and in a site with the best view of the lake. We had so much fun just being together and enjoying nature. 

On to the next adventure...

Sharon