Saturday, June 25, 2011

Also, check out my new Art Blog, Treasured Toad Designs:

http://www.treasuredtoad.blogspot.com

First Camping trip of the year! Matt, Sara and I headed down to Allegheny State Park last weekend. We rented a cabin (Matt kept complaining about setting up the tent all the time). The park is HUGE, and absolutely beautiful. We had a little rain heading down on Thursday, but things cleared up by the time we arrived. At check in here is the first thing I noticed:



Yep, Allegheny park has a good sized and active black bear population. Makes me glad we got the cabin!!! Here is a view of our cabin.



This is the inside of the cabin as we were unpacking. There were 4 twin beds, pushed together to make 2 full beds. there was also a wood-burning heating stove and a gas stovetop/oven. At least we had warm food, because all the firewood was wet and it took us until the next day (and buying dried wood at the store) to get a fire going.



The area behind our cabin. Sara LOVED the stream and she and the two girls from the next cabin over spent most of their free time playing in the water.




Here is the Red House beach area. There is a second beach area (Quaker area)but it was closed until the beginning of July. Sara had a blast swimming and playing in the sand. Matt and I enjoyed the chance to sit and relax and catch up on some reading.



We did a couple hikes over the trip. The first one was supposed to be a 3 mile "easy" trail, which ended up being ankle deep mud, steep climbs and 6 miles (since the trail ended on a road, they did not count the mileage to walk back to where the trail started, which is where our car was parked...3 miles out and 3 miles back). By the time we got back to the car, we were covered head to toe in mud. Thank goodness there was a laundromat at the camp! We were sore and tired.

This is a flower we found on one of the shorter trips. No clue what it is, but it was very pretty.




Sara climbing on one of the rock structures we found along the Bear Springs trail. On the way back on this trail we found a bear pawprint in the mud which I SWEAR was not there on our way in.



Great time, and I would definitely go back!