Camping

Mirav posted some of our exploits this morning. I will try to get us caught up. I have been out of town traveling for work most of the last two weeks. The weekend before I headed up to Seattle, we decided to head out to Spruce Run to go camping. Spruce Run is about 3/4 of the way to the coast from Portland, about an hour and 15 minutes from us.

We all drove up Friday after work, so by the time we got to the campground it was already pretty late. We had some trouble finding a campground. When we finally got one, we got our tents up and started a fire. 

Steve serenaded us all night with late 90's hits. He hasn't learned any new songs since then. 

There was only 4 of us the first night. We all huddled around the fire chatting and eating marshmallows. Nick makes some strong drinks. By the end of the night, no one was feeling very good. 

I got up the next morning and headed out to the river. Probably hard to see, but I snapped a quick picture of a deer on the other bank before it took off. Gotta love nature

Morning camping coffee was pretty great

Camping bacon, also awesome

The morning of the second day, we took a little field trip to get some more wood. We went around the corner  and up the hill to find a lake the was close by. This was the view from the top

The lake was really nice. Lots of old logs floating around. 

Our campground had a little path that lead about 30 feet down to the Nahalem river. The river, as seen in the deer photo above, was about 50 feet across and probably 5 feet deep in the middle. The edges of the river were only a couple feet deep and very rocky and was home to a ton of crawdads. The activity in the afternoon on the second day was crawdad fishing. Me, Steve and Nick grabbed some tongs and jumped in the river. This is Steve getting ready to catch some crawdads

This is a picture of our crawdad bucket. It was full by the time we were done. It was surprisingly easy to catch them. When you see one, you reach in with some tongs and grab it as fast as you can. We caught almost 50 of them in just a couple hours. 

The afternoon of the second day we picked up some extra people. Kim and Lindsey came up for the day and brought some dogs. The dogs had a blast in the river. Mike also made it up the second day and spent the night. Here's a picture of the girls. It's a rare photo of Mirav with her kindle. 

Picture of the guys getting ready to boil our catch of the day

Steve being Steve

This is what a crawdad looks like. They are gross little creatures. Since I caught them, I joined in on eating them. Turns out they aren't bad after all. 

The second night was uneventful. Some beer drinking, hotdog eating and fire watching. The next morning we packed up our stuff and headed home. It was nice to get outdoors for a while. Hopefully we can do it again soon before the rain heads back in.