I actually slept pretty well for camping. I woke up a few times, but was usually able to fall back asleep without too many issues. Sleeping with a towel over my face also helped block out the morning sun so I got a few extra z's, but once my eyes caught sight of morning light, my brain told me I was done sleeping.
I did realize that our air mattress wasn't full enough. It didn't deflate during the night, Amy's pump wasn't powerful enough to fully inflate it because it had been splashed with pool water by the kids leaving it too close after filling up pool rafts. So I borrowed Matt's later that day and filled it full for the next night.
I got up and some of the guys had started on breakfast. We had pancakes, eggs, bacon and sausage. This is my kind of camping. Aislynn woke up in time for breakfast, but really didn't like all the bugs (meat flies, I think) vying for her food, so she hopped into Garry's suburban with his three girls and Garry brought them each plates to eat in the comfort of the car.
I ate by the campfire to warm up amidst the crisp air of the morning. After breakfast, Aislynn played with her friends while I pulled out my laptop and ran a few reports for work that had to be run this morning while the plant was shut down and nothing was moving. Thankfully it went pretty quickly, and just about that time, Aislynn was ready to do something else, so we put on swimsuits and walked over to the massive pool with most of other dads and daughters.
Amy has a pool, so Aislynn is very waters-savvy and an excellent swimmer. This summer, I started launching her and her brothers into backflips, and it's one of Aislynn's favorite things in the pool to go flying through the air into the water. I couldn't do very many because my arms would wear out from launching her and a few of the other kids, but we all had fun.
After staying at the pool for a few hours, we went back to the tents and put together some sandwiches for lunch. There was a host of things to do in Gilroy nearby, but I figured we could keep ourselves busy inside the campground. We got a map of the campground, and started along the marked 1-mile walking trail. We stopped at the amphitheater and we each performed for the other. She thought the Electric Slide was hilarious, and I invited her up to try the waltz with me, but that's going to take some practice for her. We walked through the clubhouse, but there really wasn't much there. There apparently weren't any golf balls, so we just walked the mini-golf course, which I think she actually enjoyed even more. We eventually ended up back at camp, and just relaxed for awhile (1 mile is quite a lot for a 5-year-old I've found out) before deciding to go back to the pool with Bryan W. and his daughter Addison (4).
More people slowly joined us at the pool as they came back from various outings. After awhile we headed back to camp and changed clothes before dinner. Amy had graciously put Aislynn's hair in five french braids for me to make it low maintenance for the weekend, but Aislynn had lost two of the bands by Saturday morning. Thankfully Bryan W. is even more OCD than I (I really look like a disorganized lackadaisical mess compared to him), and he deftly pulled out a transparent plastic 5"x8"x1" organizer tray of every basic hair-doing accessory a dad might need and quickly firmed up the braids and re-sealed them.
Dinner was burgers, hotdogs and baked beans. A few of the girls were fed up with the attention of the bugs, and during their exploring, had found a clearing by the river a short jaunt from camp and urged us to relocate dining to there, also promising some vague surprise. They put on the invisible bench skit. I had never seen it before, but apparently it's very common for summer camps. One by one, each performer walks up and invites herself to join the existing members in sitting (crouching) on the invisible bench. The last one arrives and asks what they're all doing. When they answer, "sitting on the invisible bench," she says, "Oh, I moved that over there last week," and the crouchers collapse backwards to the ground in synchronism. I loved it.
The rest of the evening was sitting around the fire pit, roasting marshmallows for s'mores, talking and playing some card and board games. Some of the kids objected to my very efficient method of roasting marshmallows by sticking them directly in the flames to catch fire and blowing to extinguish it after a few seconds of burning (not theirs, just the two I ate). I put Aislynn down around 9:30 and I followed around 10:30.
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