Pack Family Campout!

This past weekend was our Pack Family Campout, and we had a BLAST!! On Saturday morning we met at an aviation museum. The museum has three buildings: one for planes, one for all things space-related, and one for an IMAX theatre. We were doing the space building. Out in front of it they had a really cool playground. Mom, does that rocket remind you of another park where you used to take us to play?

Here's Madison with our friend Dana on the new and upgraded version of see-saws; a bit safer than the old variety.

Kellen was having fun on toys that he was really a bit big for.... I don't know the guy and the other three kids in this picture, but Madison is second in line there and the procession of kids up the ladder looked really cute.
There was even a helicopter with a slide off the side.

Once inside the museum, we got to see all kinds of cool things.

This picture is of a Titan II Missile, and Steve says it was used for launching Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), something I never would've remembered on my own. The thing was HUGE though. It went from the ceiling of this building (similar to an aircraft carrier) and descended a fair way into the floor. This picture is taken from below the stairs at the very base of the missile.
And here's a picture of all the boys (those who came) grouped UNDER the missile. At the bottom of the first flight of stairs we stopped at a simulation room that let you feel/hear what it was like for the control room when the shuttle lifts off. It was so very cool!
After our tour was over we all wandered around looking at whatever else took our fancy, and this area took the fancy of quite a few of our number! This is a simulation game where you use a joystick and try to land the shuttle. They had another one, too, that was landing a lunar space module on the moon. Steve, of course as an avid FlightSim fan, landed the shuttle perfectly the first time. Almost everyone else blew it up a time or two before getting it right :)

After we were done inside the museum, we ate our lunch outside near the play equipment and then headed up to our camp site. Our site had obviously been used for people with horses many times before we got it, because the entire area back under the trees (where you'd want to set up your tents) was covered in a layer of road apples. Oh, well. Thank goodness for soap and hand sanitizers! Kellen did a great job helping Steve put up the tents, and we got to sign off a Webelos requirement for that :)

Mom originally bought this little camo chair for Kellen when he was Madison's age, but it doesn't fit him anymore so it's been passed down to the one who can put her backside in it!
This is just a general view of our table area where all of our crafts, food prep, and eating happened.
The kids made kites out of paper and masking tape and then wore themselves out the remainder of the evening running up and down the field flying their kites.
Then we had some leather-working, where Kellen made himself a bookmark. Our night was a little more exciting than we had planned on. There is currently a state-wide burn ban on, so we couldn't light a campfire. Instead, we lit a couple of coleman lanterns and placed them in the firepit to simulate a campfire so that we could have our evening of skits, run-ons, and songs. Just before 10pm we finally got everyone tucked in or headed to bed. Then a thunderstorm rolled in. There really wasn't much rain; truly just a little sprinkling. But boy howdy did it make up for that in the thunder and lightning!! By 2am, most of us were lying awake listening to the thunder and watching the lightning light up the sky. Now, I really love a good thunder storm, but this one was a little close for comfort, especially with us right under all those trees. I kept counting the time between flash and crash, and that storm was only 3-4 miles from us. Suddenly the cubmaster is at our tent whispering for Steve. Steve was still asleep, so I had to wake him, which shocked the cubmaster. Upon discussion, we bugged out of camp and went about 1/4 mile down the road to an empty house we had been told we could use in the event of an emergency and sat there for about an hour or so. When the storm moved on, we went back to camp and put everyone back to bed again so that we could try to get some sleep before kids woke in the morning.

So here's breakfast the following morning; the usual camp fare of pancakes, sausages, and scrambled eggs, complete with coffee or hot cocoa, depending on your preference.

After breakfast, our cubmaster (who works for the State Dept of Forestry) and his wife (who has a degree in forestry with an emphasis on education) took the kids on a short hike to point out various plant growth in the area. The kids had a great time learning about all the plants, and it was really cool to be able to point to almost anything and one of them could tell you all about the plant, any uses it might have, and some of it's unique characteristics.
So here's all of the boys who came on the camp out along with a few leaders and siblings thrown in. They wanted every person who was there to be in the pictures, but too many of us were taking the pictures...