TRAIL MIX

I just finished packing our food for our hike tomorrow. I am packing lunch and snacks for myself, Tommy, Billy, Andrew, my brother, Jimmy and his son, Nathan. Doug is not hiking with us unfortunately, but I have packed him our same hiking lunch. That's a lot of food!!!!

One of our favorite hiking foods is our version of trail mix.

Tommy and Nathan mixed up a large batch this evening and then I split it up into individual bags for us all to take along in our packs.



Here's our recipe in case you'd like to give it a try for your next hike.

1 bag each of original, cheddar, parmesan, pizza, and pretzel goldfish
1 bag cherry flavored dried cranberries
2 cups milk chocolate chocolate chips
2 cups sunflower seed kernels
1 box mini honey flavored teddy grahams

DELICIOUS!!

BACKPACKING

Andrew and Billy left early this morning to meet up with my brother to go on an overnight backpacking trip. We all love to hike! This will be Billy's first overnight trip.

I took these pictures last night as they were preparing to go. They both got new packs last year. Andrew for his birthday and Billy for Christmas. This will be the first time they are getting to use them.

Their food is all organized and ready to be added to the packs.



I bought them all kinds of convenience snack type foods that I never buy. Boy is that stuff expensive!!

Their food plan is: lunch-summer sausage, cheese, triscuits, dried fruit; dinner-canned chicken mixed with instant potatoes that I added some milk powder and gravy mix to. They'll heat that all up with water on their stove along with some hot tea to drink; breakfast-instant oatmeal packets, poptarts, and dried fruit, more hot tea.

They have cheese crackers, peanut butter crackers, peanuts, and lots of candy to snack on.

Tommy and I, along with Nathan, my nephew, will be meeting them tomorrow morning to join them for a day hike.

We'll spend the night at home where it will be much warmer than the mid-20's that are forecast for the mountain where the older boys will be sleeping tonight.

MORNING FROST

Earlier in the week, our area received our first frost. To me it seems like it was pretty late to be getting our first frost, but I don't really keep good track of these things!

It was a beautiful sight to behold.

Our wood stove is still not up and running, so Cleo, our cat, had to find warmth in the only place available, the lone burning lamp that was still lit to chase away the morning darkness.

Tommy and I enjoyed a wonderful breakfast of hot oatmeal with honey, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and hot tea or coffee. Billy was still tucked warmly in his bed, so he missed out and had cold cereal later in the morning.

HALLOWEEN PARTY

Yesterday we hosted our 10th annual homeschool halloween party. We had a turnout of around 100 people!!!!

We had the perfect weather. The food was plentiful and delicious. There was games, hayrides, hikes, relaxing, visiting, and lots of eating.

Thank you to everyone who joined us and made it such a great day!

LOTS MORE PICS

Well, here they are. It was hard to stop myself from adding even more, but I tried to pick the highlights.



Here Billy is trying a new method of climbing a tree that he learned on a show we love called "Man vs Wild". It seems to have worked great for him!

On this night we grilled meat over the fire along with potato packets. Leave it to our family not to rely on hamburgers and hot dogs. We grilled 3 different kinds of steak, chicken breasts, pork, venison steaks, and a venison chop. Oh and some hot dogs too!

We got a visit on rainy Friday from Nana and our cousin, Father Bill. It was so fun having them visit and enjoy a meal with us, even if we had to huddle under the porch roof to stay out of the rain.

Nathan and his whittling injury. Luckily, no stitches. He was back to whittling in no time!










We celebrated Susanne's birthday while we were there. My mom made an absolutely delicious pumpkin roll for the birthday cake. YUMMY!!!! Happy birthday Susanne!











I hope you enjoyed sharing my vacation memories with me. I am so blessed to be able to spend weekends like these enjoying the beautiful outdoors with my loved ones!

HOME AGAIN

On Sunday we came back from a family camping trip. We were gone for 4 days. Doug and I went with our boys, my parents, my sister and her family, and my brother and his family. There were 16 of us all together. We went to a lake in the mountains about 2 1/2 hours north of our home. We had an amazing time!! The color of the leaves was breathtaking.

The weather was...well interesting I guess. We expected very cold weather going at this time of year. We haven't really had a typical fall though, so we didn't get what we expected. The first day and night was warm and muggy. The second day was warm and rainy. The second night we had torrential downpours (leave it to us to break the drought with a camping trip!!) The third day and night was perfect. Sunny, breezy, and crisp.

We stayed busy with hiking, canoeing, eating, hunting, fishing, eating, climbing trees, whittling, eating, and playing with the fire.

We already have plans to return in the spring to celebrate 5 of our family's birthdays and Mother's Day. I can't wait!!!!

I took over 200 pictures and every one of them turned out great. I figured no one but me would want to look at that many, so I whittled down to 30. Unfortunately, blogger is having trouble loading pictures today and stopped me at 10. So, here's the start of the pictures and I'll try again tomorrow to load the rest.