Camping at Long Lake

One of my bucket list goals is to explore all of the state parks in “I need to run away to the woods for a night” distance from Milwaukee. Fairly spur of the moment, we reserved a campsite at Long Lake Recreation Area in the Northern Unit of the Kettle Moraine. The quick escape from the real world was just what we needed to unplug and reset -although if we were to have actually planned a camping trip instead of just letting the calendar tell us a 24 hour period where we might not be missing too much, we might have steered clear of the 4th of July crowd. We were kind of hoping for a peaceful campfire, but it was a little disrupted by the fire crackers going off at the next campsite...

Our campsite itself was perfect, nice and shady and backing up against some nice pine woods. Not much about for wildflowers, but there was a lot of good, dry, kindling to scavenge. While we were pretty shielded from view by the undergrowth, we could still hear most of the neighbor’s conversation. Note to anyone who cares -if you really can’t stand your kids, going out to the woods to yell at them doesn’t make it any more pleasant.

After a picnic lunch, we spent Saturday afternoon on the beach, amusing ourselves watching kids build sand castles. Lots of weeds in the lake, but the water did the trick to cool down.  Henry made a great dinner by wrapping potatoes, garlic, spinach, basil and broccoli in tinfoil and cooking the packets on the fire. Next time I think adding a little lemon to the mix would have made it even better. A little Spotted Cow and Jiffy Pop rounded off the night pretty well! What is it about Jiffy Pop and a fire that is so great?

I loved reteaching myself that doing nothing can be a lot of fun, and also read more in one weekend than I have in a while (currently reading and loving Agatha Christie’s “Poirot Loses a Client”). Its amazing how much time there is in a day when one leaves the “to-do” list at home.

We are hoping that the stars align and we can fit in one or two more escapes to the woods this summer.