A Camping Trip with Windy Waters, Upset Stomachs and Way More than Enough Food

The girls and I as Voyageurs

This past week we went on a camping trip to Voyageurs National Park.

The kids saw this cliff area and promptly wanted to climb it. I found it funny that they were climbing right above a sign that said that climbing on rocks can be hazardous.

We left on Thursday had a nice drive up there and then canoes a few miles to our campsite and then we quickly made BLTs for supper. After supper we decided to go swimming as our weather was quite warm and we had been working. After swimming we decided to sit around the campfire and tell stories. At this point Jonathan said his stomach was bothering him. Before to long he was vomiting in the bushes.

Oh no! Was he sick or did he go swimming to soon after eating or did he swallow water that made him vomit? As he continued to throw up many times throughout the night it did seem like he was truly sick. Before morning came his sisters had both joined him in throwing up. Lovely camping trip this was turning out to be!

  Friday was a day of relaxing. I tried to figure out as comfortable of places as possible for the girls to lay around all day - sleeping much of the time. As far as food was concerned - they didn't really want to eat much of anything so Ken, Aaron and I had way more than we needed. Jonathan did start feeling quite a lot better during the day so that was a blessing. 

We stayed around camp for the most part. I was thankful I brought a rag rug along to work on and a book to read. I read for a while with my little girl sleeping in my lap. Aaron and I did go on a little canoe ride for a while, collected some firewood and explored some other woods.

We had some pretty warm weather on our trip. Swimming felt pretty good each day.

 Our campsite was in a lovely location for seeing the sunset.

 On Saturday Aaron caught a fish before breakfast (the only one that our family caught up there to the disappointment of several). Jonathan filleted it and we added it to our breakfast.

 Saturday the girls were feeling quite a bit better. Megan was able to join me on my firewood gathering expedition.

 We all went out canoeing and exploring after cleaning up from breakfast. We explored several islands which was quite fun. I challenged everybody to see how many plants and what all that they could find (and then we photographed it) that would be useful if we were in a survival situation. We can't pick plants (other than berries) at a national park but we could find them. I will hopefully share a blog post on all the edible wild things we found before to long.

 While we were out that day the wind picked up quite a bit and it made canoeing on the lake much more challenging. Megan still wasn't up to par health-wise and isn't really a strong paddler anyway so I found keeping a straight course pretty hard with the wind wanting to blow me in other directions.

 We enjoy game playing and since children were a bit less energetic than normal it was a fun thing for us to do.

Sunday morning we had our own little church service (I had hoped that maybe we could make it to a church but after realizing how far we really were from about anywhere we realized that wouldn't work) and then packed up to leave.

 We faced a pretty brisk headwind (which doesn't look nearly as wild in the picture as it really was) for our whole trip back to the van. We did a lot of riding the waves which was kind of actually fun since we didn't ever tip over.

 At the visitor's center they had voyageur clothes to dress up in. We girls (the boys didn't care to join us) had fun dressing up and then had Ken take our picture.

Some of our messages

While we were gone on our trip my sister Keren and her husband Benjamin took care of our house and birds. When we left we left various instructions plus Mara and Ken left other various messages for them on post-it notes.
 When we got back we found this on our kitchen island:

Here are a couple that we found especially funny:

 They were in response to these:

I had a note on the fridge to myself to call our electrician. But they apparently thought that note was for their benefit as well:

 All in all we had a fun trip. I am feeling super thankful that Ken, Aaron and I didn't get sick. If we would have when it was time to leave I don't think we would have been able to canoe out. We would have been stuck until we got better - it was to crazy on the water to not have strong paddlers. We feel blessed!