Since the kids aren't playing soccer this spring, we had the opportunity to head down to small-town Louisiana to attend some real Mardi Gras parades (for the first time with the kids) and to fulfill our promise to them to go camping as often as we can before the weather turns sizzlin' hot. We chose Lake Chicot State Park for this trip due to a prior experience (we cabin-camped there for one of our first anniversaries, back when we lived in Lafayette for grad school) and it's relative proximity to the Lafayette area (lots of great small town parades nearby). We had tentative plans to attend 3 parades on Saturday (one in Carencro, just north of Lafayette, and two in Lafayette), buy king cake from Meche's, eat at a couple of our favorite restaurants, and take the kids to the big fancy playground on campus. We hit most of those goals. While the kids truly loved the parades, they both said that camping was their favorite part of the trip, so here are a few photos from our first night and morning at our campsite in the practically empty campground that surrounds Lake Chicot...
Nightlights in the tent make bedtime so easy. (No sarcasm. Seriously, they've made campsite bedtimes so much easier since we learned to bring the kids' favorite battery-powered nightlights!)
Easy bedtimes mean that we get to have some quiet adult time under the stars. Mancala is a little more difficult in the near-dark, but still fun.
Once we woke up, the kids piled onto our blow-up mattress for snuggles and then opened the windows to check out a different version of a "widescreen TV". We listened to the birds and squirrels, and talked about the noisy geese and raccoons that kept us up overnight, then decided to pull on our boots and go for a short walk before heading further south to the first parade of the day.
(Fiery game of checkers while daddy made coffee and hot chocolate)
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