Family Camp 2009 Day 1

Every year we go camping with my mom's side of the family. This year we all headed to Eastern Oregon to Farewell Bend State Park. It is located in an area called Hell's Canyon. We were a little worried about the weather since it was unbearably hot in Seattle the week before camping (we reached a record 103). So needless to say, we weren't too thrilled to be going camping where we were expecting it to be hot. Well, it turns out we didn't need to worry about the sun. It ended up raining--a lot. More about that later.
But first, we left Wednesday morning and caravaned with my parents and brother. And thanks to Justin's iPhone we were able to have a nice picnic lunch at a winery in Yakima. It was wonderful to sip wine and eat lunch under walnut trees. And Andrew enjoyed finding a toy alligator someone left behind. Then we were back on the road. Did I mention that it is over a 7 hour drive from our house to Farewell Bend? I was nervous that Andrew would fuss for the last few hours of the trip. But he did really well, although he didn't sleep as much as we wanted (only 2 hours the whole day). We listened to a book on cd and snacked. Andrew either wanted to sleep or eat the entire time he was in the car. It was a good thing I brought snacks for him, and toys. Sometimes I tried to distract him with toys since I didn't want him to eat for hours on end.
We arrived at the campground around 6:30pm, and we saw big rain clouds in the distance. So we quickly set up our tents and unpacked. Thankfully it didn't rain while we were unpacking, it waited until we went to bed and rained most of the night.