Miner's Retreat Days 1 & 2

We planned a Taylor family reunion in July which ended up being the event most looked forward to by my kids all summer.  My brother-in-law Matt found an awesome campground up in Midway at Wasatch Mountain State Park that was perfect for our big rowdy group.  The name of our campsite was Miner's Retreat.  It had a big pavilion, running water, flushing toilets, showers (!), tons of picnic tables, and a huge cement pad complete with a volleyball court.  It could not have been more ideal!  Here are the boys discovering the place the day we arrived:

 That first night Abby and I were in charge of dinner.  We did tin foil dinners and dutch oven peach cobbler.  It was divine!!  Food always tastes better when you're camping! 
I'm realizing that although I took a lot of pictures, I missed any of that first night.  I also didn't get any shots of the tents.  We put all the boys in one tent, which would have won the award for most smelly and dirty for sure!!  They had fun having sleepovers with the cousins though! 
On our second day the guys went golfing and the gals took the kids on a 'hike.'  I put it in quotes only because it really was just a walk along a trail.  But, from the way the kids were behaving it was their trail of tears!  Granted it was really hot and the kids were tired from a night of little sleep.  But, come on!!  We kept telling them to pretend it wasn't hot and move on.  The scenery was gorgeous, but I don't think they even looked up, the spent the whole time staring at their dragging feet and complaining!  There's a metaphor for life in there somewhere!!
Here's Puppy on the trail:

And, what do you know?  At the end of the trail there was a beautiful, cool stream to soak our weary feet in!!  You can see that Big Boy is still holding a grudge in this shot:

We had a nice time chatting in the shade while the kiddos played:

Once we got back the kids were all wiped out, especially Puppy:

The boys discovered a spool of string I brought with me and started making bow and arrows.  They then ran around the woods playing Hunger Games.  Awesome!

The group in charge of dinner that night made home made root beer.  It was delicious and Monkey and Z had a fun time with the 'smoke!'

Here's cute Ashley working on the dutch oven chicken and potatoes that were to DIE for!!  I hovered over them the whole time trying to learn more about dutch oven cooking.  I just bought our first oven (on the top) and I'm so excited about learning how to cook with it, YUM!

It was fun to put the kids to bed each night and sit around and chat with just the adults.  We stayed up way too late, but when do we ever get to do that?!  It was a blast!