A forced vacation

We had exterminators scheduled for this Friday, and because we didn't know when they were coming, and we had to be out of the house for at least 3 hours afterward, we just planned to be out of the house all day. Impromtu vacation time!

It started with a trip to the Zoo with Abbie!

The elephant statue is so much fun and just the right size for kids, so we have to take a picture of everyone on it as babies.

Cairn's favorite part of the zoo was watching the elephants play rough.  Two of the younger elephants decided to wrestle with each other.  As their trunks intertwined and pushed the other down into the water hole, an older elephant came over to supervise.  At one point she smacked them apart and pushed them back into the water.

Gauge's favorite part was "Miss Abbie and the elephants and me being an airplane there."

After the zoo, we went up Mount Lemmon to the General Hitchcock campground. We didn't want to go too far up since it was in the low 80s in Tucson because of all the rain, and more was scheduled for the day. So we went to a campground with enough trees to provide some cover from the rain and low enough that the kids wouldn't freeze. As it turned out, it never rained so much as to force us into our tent, and it actually seemed to stop raining whenever someone did go inside for whatever reason! 

The kids had fun, as you can see. Cairn and Cerise spent a lot of their time hiking around all over the place, and found some fun rock features to play on. 

the kids found some "thrones" just up the hill from our campsite. 

I found a wild, southwestern variety of Cherry that was filled with ripe fruit. The berries don't look much like cherries, but i had read about them last time we were at the visitor's center, so I was able to both identify the plant and remember they were edible.

Not my picture, but the same plant, and you can see the ripe fruit (black).

We tried some, and learned why they aren't commercially cultivated. They are pretty bland as far as berries go, and they are about half seed. They taste sort of like guava to me, but not as rich.  Aster loved the berries though, and Cerise tried roasting them as dinner cooked.

Cairn went camera-crazy. She took or arraigned most of the pictures, and mostly of Aster. We've made a collage of her handiwork. Aster for her part loves to have people take pictures of her. I think it has something to do with her still being at the age where the mirror is the best toy ever. 

Who had the most fun? Aster did, of course.

Cairn also did her fair share of posing. In fact, if it weren't for her, we probably wouldn't have a blog post for you today. 

Cairn and Gauge pose for a cute picture. You can tell whose idea this was.. Mommy's.

The kids waiting for breakfast to cook over coals.

We did take pictures of our handiwork cooking though. We tried an old trick a different way for breakfast--egg baskets, but with the bread french-toast style to protect the bread from burning. They turned out very, very nicely!...  But without the runny yoke that Carrie likes best.

Tin foil breakfast was french toast, with bacon on bottom! Yum!

And yes, they all turned out looking like that.

 We also did tin-foil dinners for dinner, which was Italian sausage with seasoned vegetables lightly coated in olive oil to keep them from getting burned. I think between the two meals, dinner was better, but not by much.

Shortly after breakfast Carrie headed down the mountain to put the house back in order and air it out before the children came home.  In the meantime I cleaned up the camp and packed everything away with the kids, and then spent some time making sure we didn't get home too early. We went up and played in the fog up the mountain long enough for the kids to complain it was freezing, me to confirm that it was black cherry from a book at the visitor's center, and to get kicked out of the visitor's center because there were too many kids playing with the merchandise. We also stopped off at Seven Cataracts to see that it was running strong after the nights rains and we lemented we didn't know where the camera had been packed away.

Meanwhile, at home, wasn't Carrie surprised to find that nothing had been done and the problem was worse than ever.  There could be a whole blog post on how to deal with less than competent  apartment management and staff. In short, she bought the heavy-duty bug killer and did it herself, and I (literally) yelled at the poor new person covering the weekend shift. (I later apologized).