Lee Family Adventures: Moon Lake

We finally got to leave and take our first real vacation in 2 years. We chose to go to Moon Lake for the first three days of our vacation. We had so much fun up there. It was so nice to not have TV, cell phones, internet, or anything else to take away from our time together as a family.

It is a long drive to get there and the boys and dog did such a wonderful job enduring the trip. This was the first trip that we didn't have the boys buried under half of what we needed to take. I thought that we would have plenty of room in our Expedition for all of our supplies for three days. Kenny thought we needed a little more room and got a box for the top of the truck. He was right, we filled the back of the Expedition and the box on top. I always over pack and as you read you will notice that this time I over packed all the wrong things.

This is our cute little cabin. It has two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom. It was the perfect size for us. We arrived at our cabin just at dinner time and we were going to roast hot dogs over the fire for dinner, but as we unloaded we quickly realized that we were missing one important part of dinner. We had forgot the roasting sticks. Boiled hot dogs it was, it worked but we were all bummed and dinner was okay but not at all what we had thought we would eat.

That first night we were there Kelton and I took Charlie for a walk down to the lake. It was so peaceful and beautiful. I was surprised to see how low the lake is, usually in June you don't have much of a beach but there was plenty of beach to play and walk on.

I had planned many fun things for us while we were staying at Moon Lake. One of those things was to bake cookies. I quickly remembered that the stove and oven in the kitchen is miniature. I forgot to take a picture of how small that appliance is, but it only had three small burners and I took my smallest cookie sheet and it wouldn't fit in the oven. We decided to try an experiment and try cooking the cookies over charcoal, it worked! We had fresh chocolate chip cookies two of the days we were there and they were wonderful. It was fun to try something new and have it work. It was also fun to watch the people in the cabins on either side of us stare at us like we were crazy.

It was also fun to find something to use the charcoal for that we had hauled all the way up there. Our original intention for the charcoal was to have a dutch oven dinner, but we quickly realized that we had forgot another important part of that dinner. What was it you ask? Oh, nothing as easy to work around as forgetting roasting sticks. Oh no, we forgot the chicken. It was still safe at home in the freezer. Even though we were all bummed, the boys were happy to have a whatever you can find you can have for dinner night. We ended up mainly eating Chex mix for dinner while we played Uno and Trouble.

I'm glad to say that we had a ton of fun that night and laughed so hard as we played games and told stories and remembered other trips we had taken together. I enjoyed watching us all pull together and not let a little thing like forgetting the meat for dinner ruin our fun.

For two days we spent the majority of our time on the beach playing. We had so much fun making all kinds of sand castles. Above and below are two of the castles that the boys built on the first day. They had so much fun digging trenches to their castles so they would have a private lake and a moat. Eventually Kenny and I got in on the building and being the Egypt nerds that we are, we had fun building a pyramid and a sphinx. However, we did run into one small problem, we had dogzilla (aka Charlie) with us and he smashed our sphinx in record time. Napoleon couldn't have done better. Taylor quickly followed and took out the pyramid. We didn't end up with any pictures of our creation, but then we also didn't get any proof of me sitting in the mud building a sand pyramid.

I did however get a picture of me digging my toes into the sand and enjoying the soft cool sand. It may not look it in this picture, but the sand there is so soft. It was like a little piece of heaven to sit there and relax and watch the boys play in the water and build their sand castles.

Kenny and the boys all decided to wade into the water and play a little. I still don't know how they did it, the water was so cold. Kenny only lasted a second and his picture is of him trying to get out of the cold water as quickly as possible. The boys somehow were able to go in and out of the water several times and had a blast just walking around in it. Taylor was trying to hold up his shorts, but they ended up soaked.

I know the boys would be upset if I left out Chunk. That is what they named the pot-gut that hung out around our fire ring. We ended up feeding him a little here and there. We were so surprised when he walked right up to Kenny and sat at his feet for a minute, Chunk was not afraid of people at all. None of could believe how many chipmunks and pot-guts there were. It was fun to watch them run around and even climb up the sides of the cabins. Who needs TV when you this kind of entertainment?

Other than forgetting a few vital items that we needed for dinner's and a couple other things that we had to go to the Lodge to buy, I don't think we did to bad. Even though we took a nap everyday we were at Moon Lake, we were so tired when we got home. This picture of Charlie sums up how we all felt when we got home, we all just collapsed for a while.