Vacation Home

This past Christmas, my parents bought us a vacation home. It's not just any vacation home... it fits in a large bag, is portable, allows my 6'5 1/2" husband to stand inside, and takes approximately 24 minutes to construct. Check it out:



Isn't our tent lovely? The bag it is toted in made us laugh when we saw the words Vacation Home and the cottage style windows in the front. We were thrilled to have a tent of our own - which meant no more borrowing or sleeping in our suburban when we felt like camping. Each month we looked ahead at weekends that might be available for camping so we could use our new tent, but none worked out until Memorial weekend. I had given up even trying to go camping until after we moved to NC because available weekends had diminished and the FL weather is steadily creeping up to unbearable. I came home one evening last week and my husband had all the camping gear out with a note saying, "How about camping this weekend?" I couldn't resist - even if it was for just one night.

We chose to camp at Anastasia State Park in St. Augustine (no, not the picture above ;). It was one of the state parks I had on my list of places to go and it just happened to have Sunday night open! We left right after church with our bird and all to begin the hour and a half drive. It was definitely worth it! The campsites are great and the opportunities at the park are numerous. We set up our tent in record time, explored the beach, cooked dinner over the fire and stayed up late in the tent playing card games. Sunny didn't seem to mind camping much. He didn't squawk incessantly which led us to believe he was content - even with the incredibly loud insects surrounding us. And guess what? I didn't forget the pillows this time! See first camping post here.

Sleeping through the night wasn't too pleasant as a rain storm approached and seemed to last the ENTIRE time I was supposed to be sleeping. I was lying on the air mattress (which we have yet to make it comfortable) praying no thunder and lightning would approach or else I'd have to sleep in the car. Thankfully, we had only rain, and lots of it. In the morning we were pleased to find just a small puddle in a little corner as opposed to a wet mess - it's fixable.

We awoke to a very warm morning, ate our muffins, and headed to the park shop to rent us some bicycles. It was fun riding around observing others' tents and RVs, soaking in good ideas for our next trip. I hadn't ridden a bike in a while, or with my husband for that matter, and I thoroughly enjoyed the activity. We forgot to take a picture though. Oh well. Guess we'll have to do it again!

Here are a couple pictures from our 24 hour visit to the park. I'm glad we got to go and I recommend the park to anyone in or visiting the Florida area. It's definitely worthy of a long weekend stay.

see our kite up in the sky? :)