"Look for the BEAR necessities of life. "

We always have fun camp stories to tell and this year holds no exceptions. On the first night at about 1:00 in the morning we heard this dog barking. I thought that after a minute the owner would get the dog to be quiet but it just kept on barking and barking and barking. We could hear some guys yelling. I stuck my head out of the tent and a few campsites away from us I saw this huge fire and couldn't figure out why ??? Later we found out that a bear was wandering around in our campground snooping in the trash cans. The forest service had brought a dog in to scare the bear out. They had also built the fire to scare him off too. The night was long but the bear was gone right????

Second night we made sure all the food was up so the bear didn't come into our camp. At every little sound Abbygail would think the bear was in our camp. Josh would go out to reassure her everything was fine. It was another long night. The bear did come back and so we had a repeat of night one.

Third Night. We did better. No bears in our camp so we were glad to not have the barking dog go off for what seemed like hours. Some time in the middle of the night Josh & I woke up freezing and laying on hard rocks. Our air mattress had popped and so we were sleeping on top of the rocks and cold ground. All I could think of was," Holy Cow Are we ever going to sleep???"

Night Four. We made it! Still up and down and a little jumpy from the bear but better. No rocks in the back. We bought an extra blanket so that when Josh rolled one way I still had covers and when I rolled the other way I didn't steal them from him. No tug o war.

Night Five. Some time around 2:00 in the morning I heard this huge cracking noise followed by a loud metallic bang. The camp instantly went dark. The Christmas lights that we had strung around our camp were no longer shining. After a few minutes we figured all the lights in the camp ground were out including the bathrooms. We then heard a bunch of men yelling and a couple of chain saws revved up. Josh and I just sat in our tent laughing. Maybe they were chopping down the tree because the bear was in it. Who knew?

After about an hour of the lumberjacks playing Paul Bunion while everyone was trying to sleep we heard some large diesel truck pull in and unload some equipment. The kind of machines that go beep beep when they back up so everyone knows they are there and you get out of their way. It dragged its metallic front bucket across the ground making a loud screeching noise for about a half and hour. The men finally stopped the chain saw, tractor and all the other ruckus and the lights turned on somewhere around 5:30 A.M. We found out that a tree had fallen over in the middle of the night and landed on a power line. Both of which landed in the middle of the road next to our camp. After letting the kids play in the river for a little while and then going down to the beach one last time we decided that we were going to head home before we stayed one more night. With our luck the whole camp would go up in flames. LOL