Camping...where do you all sleep?

I'm thrilled to be able to talk with you this week about how much our family loves camping! Today I will start with where do we all sleep. The simple answer is in our pop up camper. Don't know what that is? It's a small camper that folds into itself and can be pulled behind a mini-van. Our 8 seater chevy astro (not quite) mini-van does a great job pulling our little camper. This weekend we got the camper out and cleaned it up from it's winter slumber so the following are some pictures from our humble camper.

As you can see it's a little worn in some places but for us it's so much nicer then a tent. (one of the pictures shows the before clean up spots) Years ago when we first started camping with our family we tent camped. Eventually we had a mid-range size tent for Steve, myself, and really little kids, and then we had gotten the older kids their own little pup tents. We looked like a tent village and we had made a few campgrounds...er...well...not happy with how many tents we used.

And then there was the difficulty of sleeping on the ground. I was...well...kinda grumpy towards the end of a weekend from lack of good quality sleep. The kids couldn't have cared less about sleeping on the ground but I guess you could say I wasn't...a cheerful camper. My dad solved this by buying me a blow up air mattress one year. Boy did that help a lot! But it still wasn't as easy to load all the stuff in the van with the kids. We were happy to be able to go camping but were looking for a solution to make it a little easier.

The year my dad suggested he give us our anniversary gift, christmas gift, and birthday gifts all in the form of money towards our goal of buying a pop up camper was an awesome answer to how could we afford it. We took the money we had saved and the gift money and we started looking. It took a few trips to find the perfect camper but we eventually found it.

This camper has two bunks that pull out. One is about the size of a king size mattress and the other about the size of a full. It has a table with a bench on either side that folds down to about the size of a twin mattress and another table with benches on three sides that also folds down to about the same size. This makes it possible to tightly fit all eight of us in the pop up for sleeping.

But the truth is we don't often have all eight of us sleeping in it at once. Many times a child or two will go and beg plead sweetly ask if they can sleep in Grandma and Grandpa's RV. And of course they say yes! And sometimes we will have one of the older boys bring a tent to sleep in so they can still enjoy tent camping.

As you can tell we really enjoy camping!