My birthday was Friday and when my husband asked what I wanted to do for the weekend, camping was the first thing that popped into my mind. But before the camping action, this is what our Friday looked like.
A festive kitchen!
Homemade coconut milk ice cream in the Cuisinart. Healthy and such a hit!
Lots of wonderful friends.
And last but never least, by husband who made the whole entire week awesome.
Last month I was making a “tending list” for daily, weekly, and monthly priorities. Gosh–I want to keep doing this every month because it has already caused me to really prioritize what’s important to me and actually do those things. One of the items on the monthly tending list was “plan outdoor adventure and follow through with it.” Being outdoors is one of our values but sometimes we don’t prepare for fun outdoorsy things and they just don’t end up happening.
If we don’t write down our values or plan to prioritize them, we can easily forget what actually gives us joy and life.
Live intentionality.
I knew this birthday weekend was a prime opportunity to embrace the outdoors and pursue our values together. We didn’t have a long weekend and we also didn’t have a lot of time for hiking so the hubs scouted out an area to camp that happened to be a short 15 minute drive from our house.
We drove to the place he marked on the map but it didn’t look too promising so we opted to phone a friend who we knew had recently been camping. He recommended a spot that wasn’t far away.
It was beautiful.
A little red camping outfitter and snack shop tucked underneath the mountains.
We spoke to the man (pictured below) who owned the shop and paid him the equivalent of $2.79 to literally camp in his field. EPIC! He wasn’t using the field for anything at the moment, therefore it was just a patch of grass with a bunch of trash that other campers had left –come on, people!
Right in front of the red outfitter shop, was this adorable kid. The man said it was born at 1 AM that morning (15 hours earlier). I began taking a thousand pictures of it because it was just that cute. But before I knew it, the uncle (that’s what we call older men here) grabbed the little goat and shoved it in my arms for me to cuddle. It immediately stopped bhaaaing (or whatever sound you would call it) and was perfectly quiet and content.
umm…did we just walk into a petting zoo?
Apparently the man didn’t tell us which field was his because just as we were putting the last stake into the ground, a lady started yelling questions to me in the local language. “Who told you you could stay there?” she asked. Three minutes later, we found ourselves moving our tent and belongings three fields up.
DINNER: Our favorite easy camping dinner has turned into 4 small packs of instant noodles topped with cut up b**f jerky (thanks to Costco and our loved ones who transported it). We save our American “protein sticks” specifically for camping trips since it adds flavor and b**fs up our meal (pun intended). Plus, it’s delicious!
DESSERT: pepper dark chocolate bar from our friends in Indonesia
After dinner, we turned up Michael Buble’ on our speaker, watched the moon rise over the hill next to us and danced under the moonlight. It was almost a full moon and seemed to light up the whole field and surrounding area.
We had a quick turnaround from our camping adventure since we had things to get to in the morning but every moment of stillness in the great outdoors was worth it.