December tends to be a bit of a clean-up month around here, as I hustle to share in the same calendar year anything of note that hasn’t quite made it to the blog! As such, I’ll occasionally serve up posts that are a bit out of season – but we’ll just consider them inspiration for the seasons ahead :) In this spirit, today I’m sharing a few photos and stories from our eighth annual family camping trip with the Rays. Hold onto your boots – it was a cold and wet one! For our eighth year, we returned to Blue Bear Mountain Camp, outside of Boone, North Carolina. As always, our car was absolutely stuffed. This was our third trip to Blue Bear, and it never disappoints – it’s a lovely campsite, with friendly people, and decent bathroom facilities (ha!). Sadly, we had to postpone from our original weekend due to weather, and we did not get our top choice campsites upon rescheduling. The sites were actually pretty inconvenient, especially for families with small children – down a steep hill from the cars and bathrooms, and with a fairly steep (though wooded) drop-off on the other side. But we made the best of it! We arrived on Friday afternoon in gray chill, which eventually progressed into mist (the photos of our site were all taken the next morning!). The grass was already wet from rain earlier in the day, which made hauling in our gear tricky and resulted in wet feet almost immediately. Thankfully, John and I were well equipped thanks to his excellent suggestion to wear our Bean boots, but for some reason we didn’t extend that logic to our kiddos, so they quickly were complaining of cold, wet feet – not pleasant, and I don’t blame them one