Camping weekend

Erin and I don't go camping very often. We aren't against it, we just tend to spend all of our free weekends at the cottage. Well this past weekend we travelled to Houghton Lake, MI for some camping with our friends from Kelloggsville. The weather was very odd for mid-August. The first night it dipped into the low 40's and both Saturday and Sunday struggled into the 60's, so we spent the majority of the weekend just hanging around the campfire which was plenty of fun.

We had no shortage of food.

Nate brought his family's boat so we launched it on Saturday and everyone endured the cold air to enjoy tubing. Houghton Lake is the largest inland lake in Michigan but is only 10 feet deep most of the way around with some very shallow spots and a maximum depth of 23 feet.

Here the girls are enjoying a ride.

After boating on Saturday we played bocce ball and then got a little picture crazy.

The pictures started out as nice posed shots of the girls, guys, and the whole group.

But then someone had the idea to do a jumping picture. We set 5 different cameras up on a 10 second timer and then set them all off at once. We tried to time our jumps so that we would all be in the air when the cameras flashed but it was much harder than we anticipated. The experiment was very dorky but much more fun than I imagined.

This is the best one. Basically everyone is off the ground or just barely touching. With our average hang time in the group, I consider this picture a major accomplishment...actually it was nearly miraculous.

On Sunday we went to the nearby Higgins lake and launched the boat for a joy ride. Higgins lake is also very large but much deeper. Sunday was windy and the waves rivaled Lake Michigan so the joy ride was a lot of fun.

Nate and I made one of the world's largest pancakes with M&Ms. It was fantastic.