Life As We See It: Camping @ Pine Lake

This last weekend we went to the Homecoming retreat at Pine Lake Christian Camp. We camped in a tent and cooked all our own food along with our friends the Mills' and Skinner's. I am not much of a camper... never really camped when I was young... so I would much prefer a cabin over a tent. But I will say it was very fun waking up in the mornings with all the kids right there... and I slept pretty good considering the rain we received on Friday night. It was our first time using our tent that Thaddeus had purchased at an auction so we were'nt really sure if it would leak or not... sure enough, Saturday morning around 1am it stormed and we got wet! (we recieved about 2in of rain in an hour!) Because it was raining so hard our tent just couldn't do the job... it was basically raining in our tent! Bennett had been sleeping on the floor of the tent and had a seem right over her, so she was getting rained on... I put a towel on top of the edge of our suitcase and across to a chair so she would be shielded from the rain... she never woke up! The boys slept with us on our full size air mattress. We probably got 4 hours of sleep that night... but somehow we all felt pretty rested!

Gunnar playing baseball... he's got pretty good form!

Conrad lounging on Steve & Tina's tent

Bennett having a great time with her bear in the stroller

Gunnar and Jordan... They're pretty much best friends! The weekend ended with a bang! A huge hail/wind storm came through Eldora around 10am... Roger came over to our camp ground around 9:30am and told a storm was coming soon so we should pack up... It was misting at that time so we were just going to leave everything up to dry but decided to pack up since a storm was coming. Everyone got packed and moved vechiles over by some cabins under some trees... hoping that the trees would block the cars from the hail. Everyone managed to get into the chapel just as it started raining. The storm quickly turned from just rain and some wind to golfball/ walnut sized hail and 70 mph winds... so we quickly moved into the hallway in the chapel for safety. All you could hear was banging on the roof and walls from the hail and all you could see out the windows was rain and branches and leaves flying around... it was pretty intense! The damage is amazing... I have never seen anything like before. Most of the trees have very little leaves left on them and many trees and branches fell due to the strong winds. Here are some pictures of the damage and what we saw as we emerged from the chapel.