Continuing on a theme

Today I spent some time with Laura cleaning up the "campsite" behind the house. We raked out all the sticks and pulled as many of the weeds as we could. Next we started a campfire and put on a nice big piece of punky wood to smoke out the mosquitoes who have been raiding the back yard for days (one of the downsides to living on the river.)

We put down some foam pad for sitting/sleeping and read a story. Then we talked about the importance of paying attention to your fire at all times and the things that could go wrong if you didn't.

Laura's only 4 1/2 but she seems to understand an amazing amount of the information I throw at her. There's hope that I've got a lifelong hiking buddy here.

Once she'd had enough of the smoke we put water on the fire, made sure the embers were out, and stirred everything into the soil.

We're contemplating leaving the site up for the whole summer. It's far enough behind the yard that it won't interfere with the landscaping and the tarp isn't too much of an eyesore although the Hilleberg 5XP will blend in much better.

In the next few days we'll be playing around with pitching options on the Hilleberg tarp until we've got one we're satisfied with leaving pitched for an extended period. I'll try and get pictures and descriptions up for each of the methods.

Thanks for reading,

B