Every year since my kids started school (my oldest is now 40!) we would go on a camping trip during the MEA school vacation. For those of you not in Minnesota, MEA is the Minnesota Educators Association and they have meetings every year in October.

Some years we end up wearing snow pants and winter coats and play in the snow, other years we’re in T shirts. We started out taking bicycles and then moved to 4-wheelers. This year we moved back to bicycles for the first time in many years.

Our group this year included all 7 grandkids and 7 adults. For the past 3 years we have been going to Fisherman’s Point Campground in Hoyt Lakes. My 90 year old uncle lives there and he comes out and hangs out with us at the campsite and even takes us all out to a fish fry at a local restaurant in Aurora called Megan’s. The businesses have lots of fun Halloween decorations that the kids (and adults) enjoy seeing. This year we all noticed how much better behaved the gang was in the restaurant (kids ages 4 to 14). No one even spilled a drink!

There was this cute little Snoopy Dog House covering something in the campground and my daughter-in-law jokingly mentioned that we should get a picture of Max, our 14 year old Beagle on top of the dog house. So we all hiked down to the landing and got a group picture with the kids and my uncle. All of the kids were very cooperative (unusual) I think mostly because they were trying to get Max to cooperate! He was a little nervous about sitting on that roof.

With all the variety of ages we didn’t do very long bike rides, the little ones thought we went REALLY FAR, but I don’t think we rode over 4 miles at one time. They did really have fun at the skate park in town (I’m getting too old to watch the kids tearing around jumping ramps with bikes, YIKES!) Truthfully, my backside was okay with not doing the 20 mile rides that we used to do. Especially since it was like the second time all summer I got on my bike!

Someone thought it would be fun to get a photo, tallest to shortest. We were missing one of the kids. The tallest is my oldest grandson who is 14. It was a super fun weekend.