CAMPING!!

I know that camping is not a novelty for plenty of you, but, unfortunately, it is for me. I have some great memories of camping as a child, mostly in Florida playing horseshoes with my dad (except the horseshoes were plastic flowers; I would love to have those again). My happy memories also involve hiking with my high school friends, roasting apples over the campfire, eating blueberry pop-tarts for breakfast, and, of course, listening to Green Day with the Ashcrafts in Lake Texana over Thanksgiving. Not to mention Suzette and I spraying each other down with bug spray at Camp Karankawa.
The only time I've camped in Arizona was at Lake patagonia, which was beautiful and very fun, but was more than two years ago.
So when our ward announced its ward campout, I cleared my schedule. Time to play!!! (I really, really needed to get outside.)
The night before, I went shopping for the essentials. Which included a tent. Because at some point even if a girl doesn't camp all that much, she needs a tent. In this case, she bought a tent for her future family. Which looks like this:

I found this tent earlier online and fell in love with it. And then I went to four different stores until I found it on sale at Sports Authority for $60 off 15 minutes before they closed. Whoo-hoo!!! Also included as camping essentials were: a first aid kit, a camping chair, a flashlight, a hammock, and marshmallow roasting sticks. Perfect, right?
Back to the tent, which received several nicknames during the campout. "Tent house" "Taj Mahal" "Best of Show" and
"The Palace" were my favorites. Mostly, it was just really fun. And it was easy to set up, which made all us girls very cool. And then we helped the guys set up theirs.
I went with 3 girls, 2 of whom are new in my ward. One, Annette, is 30 also. She's the one with short brown hair. And we talked nonstop for 3 1/2 hours all the way there. I've learned fairly recently something about 30-year old single girls. We have a lot of good stories. And we talk a LOT. (There's another girl in my ward that I had the same experience with.) Anyways, Annette is fabulous and I totally love her. Megan (the other blonde) is 29 and also totally cool. She just got back from her mission in Chile and is a nurse. She also always talks like she might just be a little bit high, which might just make me like her even more. And the girl with long brown hair is JoAnn. She moved here from Texas and is Megan's friend and is 33, but likes to say she's 25.
And she is very fun, too.

The thing that you may have noticed is different about this post than other ones is that it involves friends of mine that are GIRLS. I know this is a novelty, but it's something I'm really trying to cultivate. You know, girl friends who don't only live 600+ miles away. And this was such a fun way to get to know each other.
So anyways, we drove a million miles to our campsite, which was beautiful but had only 1 toilet for 100 people and magically did not break. We ate smores and talked and looked at stars with the iphone app that tells you exactly what you're looking at. In the morning, I (of course) slept through breakfast and got up feeling fabulous. Annette, me, and JoAnn went on a hike to a spring that we found out didn't exist, but which was good for working off the Pop-Tarts anyways. This is what Megan did while we hiked:
I also broke out my hammock afterwards and ate Wheat Thins and Easy Cheese like I used to do at girls' camp. It was awesome. This is the view from the hammock:

And then, we packed up and went home. And the tent even fit back in the bag. Which I have to admit, I was a little nervous about.
So the trip...
It was quick. It was fast. It was beautiful. It was perfect. Ahh...