May 23 - Friday

May 24 - Saturday

I'm sitting by a bend in the stream along Beaver Lake Trail at Pocohontas State Park. It's a beautiful spot, where there is a magnificent view of the stream bending through the woods, with sand banks on both sides. It's close to the Old Mill site. The kids are having races with toy boats.




We had a picnic lunch by the stream, then we hiked back to the car. After we had a drink, we went to the swimming pool, but the water was really cold, so nobody swam much.



After swimming we went back to the campground. The kids went to the little playground and had ice cream (bought from the campground store) while I had a nap.



Afterwards we made a fire and cooked dinner. We cooked biscuits and cornbread on sticks over the fire and had beef stew and spaghetti.



I had noticed yesterday that people seemed to be watching us as we cooked and it just occurred to me today that we hadn't seen anybody else cooking, even the few other folks in tents. While we were fixing dinner tonight, a family pulled in next to us who also had a tent. They set up their tent, then I figured they'd also be cooking, but instead they all piled back into their car and took off, I assume to the McDonald's down the road. Same syndrome with folks not wanting yards or gardens -- they seem to want camping without effort (wasn't there a language learning series called something like "French without Toil"?)

May 25 - Sunday

We got up at about 7:30. We took down the tents, packed everything into the car, then went on "Fern's Nature Trail" at the campground. It was short - just took 15 minutes. Then we went to McDonald's for breakfast.