Niebauer Family: Camping and kayaking and caves... oh my!

What a great weekend we've had! We realized we didn't have any plans, so we decided to go camping. We opted to just go for one night, which ended up being the right decision because on Friday night it rained cats and dogs all night. We ended up spending the night at Mike's parent's house on Friday. They were out of town, and Caroline kept wandering around the house asking for Nana and Papa, which was cute and a little sad. But we had a couple of friends- our upstairs neighbors Jen and Bill- over for dinner, so that was fun.

Then on Saturday we headed out to Nelson Dewey State Park in southwestern Wisconsin, on the Mississippi river. On our way there, we happened upon a little railroad museum where they gave train rides. Caroline got really good at saying "choo choo". Once we got to and checked into our campsite, we spent the afternoon kayaking a smaller tributary river. We lucked out in meeting up with some other campers who were planning to canoe, so we could leave cars at either end and not have to paddle up river. (We overheard them talking at the rangers station and then just happened to run into them at the put-in. Very serendipitous.) Mike was thankful for that, since he is our resident paddler. I'm our resident child wrangler, though to be honest, I wasn't much of a paddler before the kid came around :) It just works better that way- no clanking paddles...

So the kayak ride was awesome! It was such a warm, sunny day and the river was just the right speed- enough of a current to keep you going and a few little bumps to keep it interesting without the fear of dumping over. Caroline seemed to really love it- she stuck her hands in the water and pointed at the birds and trees. It was great!

Then we just came back to camp, BBQed some dinner, and caught up with our new river friends at the campsite. It would have been nice if Caroline could have just gone to sleep and we could have sat by the campfire, but we knew from our last camping trip that she would be too excited. And boy was she. But eventually she conked out and so did we. It was such a hot night that we didn't even really need sleeping bags and Caroline just slept in a diaper.

The next day we drove back to Madison. We stopped at Cave of the Mound, a big series of caves with stalactites and stalagmites and all that jazz. Strange that Mike had never been there before... but it was really cool. The only problem was that Caroline wanted to run around and touch everything and had a fit that she couldn't. And since it was a tour with lots of stops and other people, we couldn't really just duck out. So we just chased after her and tried to entertain her without annoying all of our other tour mates (no serenading them with old McDonald)... We were exhausted by the time we got home and we all had to take a little nap.

OK, this one isn't from the weekend, but it was so cute I couldn't resist. This is Caroline having dinner on the porch. Mia, our neighbor Jen's Boston Terrier, was there to pick up all of her droppings and give her a little doggie hand wash when she was done.

Riding the train with daddy

At the campsite. We had to put a little extra barrier around the fire-ring... such a curious little one we have, saying "hot" and running towards the flames.