I hope you all enjoyed the last blog I posted. I had been working on it for about 2 months. I really wanted to do it justice and let everyone know how important people were in this journey!

So last week we had our family vacation. We decided this year to go camping and take our boat. We reserved our campsite 2 months in advance to ensure we got a site right where our boat docked. Well, here’s how the week went:

The day we before we were supposed to leave, our air conditioner stopping blowing cold air. The weather was in the 90s and high humidity. It was 89 degrees in my kitchen! We were going crazy trying to pack and trying to get someone here to fix the air conditioner. Our dog was to stay and the neighbor was going to take care of letting her out, but we couldn’t leave unless the air was fixed. Thankfully, the guy arrived at 10pm that night and it was able to be fixed with a part on his truck.

That was the first to go wrong. We left the next morning, where we were going was about an hour and half drive. I pulled the camper and my husband pulled the boat. Seemed go pretty smoothly except for construction and traffic. We get there and get everything set up, boat in the water, awesome. We jump into our bathing suits and head out on the lake in the boat. We get a good ways out and my husband is steering, feels a pop in the gear shift. We find that we are only idling. Uh-oh. Well, we head back to camp to take it apart and find that our gear cable has snapped. We head to the marina on site and they have the cable in stock luckily. My husband and son work on it while I’m making dinner. We had a great campfire dinner of smoked sausage, potatoes, onions and cheese! Smores for dessert! Yum! Boat was fixed and we took it out for a little evening fishing! Turned out to be pretty good.

Until, just after we settled in for the night. Bugs chased my oldest out of the camper, he slept in the back seat of a truck, haha. Raccoons woke us periodically through the night with trying to get into totes under the camper, looking for food. Rain started pouring down about 2 o’clock in the morning. We decided to rise about 6:30 and looked out of the camper and saw water from our door to the canal our boat was floating on. L. We sat inside and tried to figure if we should wait it out or pack up. The weather report showed flash flood warning until 12 midnight that day and it was only 7AM!! A neighboring camper stopped by and told us our shoes that were outside the camper were floating downstream, that made my decision. We were leaving. Now we can laugh about this, well you can laugh anyway because I’m sure if this was captured on camera we probably would have earned some money on a family video kinda show! Me, my son and my husband racing through rain, throwing things in the back of pickups, the camper and ripping a boat out of the water. Now on the first day the task of setting up everything took about an hour and half, literally took us 30mins to get everything loaded, lol! We were soaked standing in ankle deep water with mud. We drove home almost lost one of the floats on the highway, traffic was crazy. Semis buzzing past us flinging rain! We finally get home, later on in the day we were able to open the camper to let it dry.

Next day we decide to try and salvage at least spend a day on the boat we head out to a closer creek. We get everything loaded, stop for bait and have to drive around to find an open boat ramp. The creek is building a marina and has drained the water so some boat ramps are too shallow to load a boat. We find one get the boat in and head out! Around the corner to the next island our engine starts spitting and sputtering. Oh no. We are out of gas. The gas gauge on the boat is broken, we left the gas can at home. We call out to the state park office and there is no one on the water to help. So we flag down a really nice guy on a jet ski and he takes my husband to the boat ramp so he can go get gas. An hour later we have gas, do a couple spins on the creek with our oldest on a knee board and come home. Craziness!

We then fought the rain the rest of our vacation. Our sons baseball games were rained out, no amusement parks would have been fun in the rain and our pool was overflowing. So unbelievable! I felt so bad for the kids, we tried really hard to get everything up and running as best we could. Oh well, you have to have one vacation like the Griswalds!

Since this is a weight loss blog, having a week off can really wreak havoc on foods and my body not having work outs. Of course being camping I chose foods that are easy to prepare. I may or may not be able to adjust calories. It’s a rule that you must have smores while camping! Even if I opted to spend a week out of town with no other choice to eat out, options will be slim. So I let it be, I enjoyed my time with my family. I’m taking it all back to the gym this week and sweating it out.

Hope you all enjoying your summer! I also hope your vacations go better than ours did! J