returning victorious!

Enjoying the some home cooking, after the Camp out.

Maxwell and Mark have been away this week for a school nature camp.

We are not an outdoorsy family, even a little bit.
We don't even like going outside of the city limits, so this was a very big deal.

To live without real coffee and cigarettes for days was huge for Mark, and he did it!

Hooray!

The biggest problem, aside from the concept of sleeping on a wooden slab, and going without a shower for more than a day, was that we don't own any of the thousands of pieces of camping gear the OMSI folks demand that your bring with you.

The only sleeping bag we have, for instance, is a Scooby Do toddler model given to Maxwell by one of our neighbors.

Air mattress, rain pants, woolen underwear (seriously!), hiking boots, oh the list went on and on, and we had NOTHING.

Thank god Mark's sister married one of those camping types last year and he was able to prevent us having to go into bankruptcy over this one trip.

They had a really nice time checking out the end of the Lewis & Clark trail, eating smores and spending time together, but they were happy to be home.
Freyja and I were happy to have them home. With Rolf gone too, I was left to sleep with the animals (otherwise the poodle howls in the middle of the night from loneliness).

Freyja was totally unwilling to sleep upstairs alone, so I wound up with a giant cat, Miss F, and the poodle in Rolf's double bed.
It was not relaxing to say the least!
Rolf is a lovely person, a brilliant person, but a terrible housekeeper and his room is packed floor to ceiling with books and old newspapers, cat hair and dust, so in addition to not having extremely fresh air to breath, each time I shifted in bed, a stack of papers would crash over.
Like I said, not relaxing.
Maxwell will be back on dog duty tonight!