There's no place like home....

It so true.....vacations are great but so is being back home again!!

Well, once again I had a great time at Buckskin State Park in the constant 100 plus degrees! Amazing!

We went on many boat rides,

taking time to shut off the engine and just drift and enjoy the scenery and jump off the boat to cool off when the heat was too much.

We cooked some fun meals:

Son enjoys using his DUTCH OVEN for many meals including breakfast and even deserts. This kind of cooking has quite a following. There are competitions and recipe swapping and many websites devoted to the "art" of Dutch Oven cooking.

I made a meal that I remembered my kids always enjoyed when they were little. We used to do this in a firepit at the beach. Wrap each item in foil and put it all in the coals:

red pototatoes

sweet potatoes

zucchini

corn

onions (cut almost all the way through in eights and put in center cavity: butter, beef bouillon cube, dried thyme...tastes like french onion soup)

apples (leave whole but hollow out the core: fill with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, nuts, raisins)

banana boats ( lay banana on side, peel down long strip, cut out long wedge of banana, fill with mini marshmallows and choc chips, replace wedge of banana and strip of peel)

Gourmet S'mores: chocolate grahams, white chocolate, strawberry and chocolate marshmallows (we never actually got to make these due to the surprise Monsoon...)

I colored in colorbooks, played wild animal bingo and pre-school UNO.

I sat in the shade and read magazines and drank gallons of cold drinks.

We did have several glitches during the week:

We hit a rock with the propeller and lost a day of boating while Son had to find a replacement.

We were surprised by a Monsoon one night that even the locals said was unlike any they'd seen in along time. Incredible thunder and lightning, a huge downpour, leaks in the trailer, and a hysterical 4 yr.old made for an unexpected adventure. We were safe, but there were flashfloods in the nearby town, and in the morning we found "Boaty" completely up on the beach (it had been too late to get him out of the water the night before).

By noon we were back in business with no damage done. However, up around the bend of the river the winds were so strong that some boats were flipped out of the water onto the docks, crushing whatever was in the way!

Also, on our second day we got a phone call with some serious and scary family news

(see Daughter's blog) which put a damper on my mood until I knew things were O.K. (more in my next post)

It's good to be back home with my hummingbirds, my laptop, my daily blogs to read, and my spacious kitchen, just in time to make a chocolate-peanut butter-ice cream-cake for D-I-L's 29th B'day today.......

And I still have a long 4 day weekend left before I have to be back at work next Tuesday!

It's good to have things back to normal.......I think I hear my sewing machine calling me......