was a rousing success but not without its adventures. Woke up Wednesday at 5:00 to the sound of rain and when I went to rescue my shoes I decided to check my tarp set up (I'm an extreme novice at tarping) I realized it needed some adjusting to achieve maximum dryness and so I spent an actually pleasant 3 hours doing that, puttering about, drinking my tea by the fire, reading (I had mangaged to get the tarp over the fire area!) and listening to the rain. By the time the kiddos rolled out the rain was tapering off and they liked riding bikes in it anyway and by the time we cleaned up from breakfast it was pretty much over. We had a light and quick shower as we started on our afternoon hike, but then the sun came out and stayed out for the rest of the trip. My Coleman tent did beautifully again, my new dining screen tent did well, but I do wish they made a rain fly for that - oh well, my extra tarp served us well. Campsite was pretty mucky in spots, but nothing we couldn't walk around.

I did some more dutch oven cooking and even tried my hand at cooking with wood coals (I didn't bring enough briquets) and we discovered a new breakfast favorite - Rhodes carmel rolls. Ok they weren't from sratch but hey, the coals were :)

Then there was the hike! Beautiful hike in the canyon, behind the waterfall, planned to go down to the next of 10 waterfalls, but we got sidetracked off on a little trail that lead down to the stream where there was a log across which the children just had to cross. Very nice, we relaxed had our snack and the girls scrambled over the log and then waded back to our side. The adventure began when son, aged 7, decided he wanted to go over the log as well but forgot to take off his shoes on our side of the stream. He should have come back over the log, but before I realized what he was doing he was halfway across the stream with shoes in hand. The water was about mid calf deep but running very swift and he was having a bit of trouble keeping his balance and dropped one of his shoes. Sister had waded out to help him navigate and so rescued the shoe and taking his other one, turned and chucked the dry shoe at the bank. It missed, but was close enough to shore to be quickly fished out. Then sister tried to do the same with the other shoe but not realizing the difference in weight due to it being wet she underthrew and it to missed the bank. This time, despite two sets of hands that grabbed at it as it floated by, it took off like a shot downstream. I jumped in and waded down as far as I could but alas, the boy's nearly new shoe is now either sunk on the bottom or who knows, maybe its floating in the Willamette! Now I had a barefoot boy and myself in soggy tennys. What to do but heist the boy on my back piggy back and squish the 1/4 mile back to the paved part of the trail. Needless to say, we didn't finish our hike and actually, except the lose of the shoe, it was kind of a funny incident. Made the trip memorable anyway.

The children made some freinds one of whom also lost a shoe but it caught on fire - she wasn't in it at the time.

All in all we had a great time and are ready to go again. Our next trip in in 3 weeks and will be our most uncivilied trip of the summer as we are going to a FS campground without showers.

Oh yeah I saw a new trick I'm going to keep in mind. A guy had a rope strung over his campfire and had his kid's shoes hanging on a bungee from the rope. Neat way to dry shoes!