The Camping Chronicles: Getting There

For the long weekend we went camping with my whole family. It was some serious fun. It was the first time in 1 1/2 years that the whole family was together at the same time. I know lots of families have longer lapses than that, (like if a missionary is out!) but it was still good to all be together.
So, since Aaron always gets Friday's off anyway, his place of employment let there employees off Thursday too, for the holiday. So Thursday morning we headed out to a camp ground near Sublett Idaho. We were kind of looking for a central location to camp so the whole family could go without having to drive 6 hours or so. But there really isn't much between SLC and Boise but sagebrush and dirt. But we thought we'd found a place that might work on the internet.
We pulled off into Sublett and passed farms and sagebrush. We also saw this sign. The town is so small that they have a list of all the families and a map showing which house is theres! We thought it was funny.


After passing the houses and a reservoir we were on a dirt road through a dry canyon with grazing cattle. Here is what we saw:
Not long later we came to the Sublett campground, which was one of the camping spots we had been considering. It seemed to be shared with cows. No pine or aspen trees or anything. There was a little stream and some small bush/trees along it. Very discouraging. But there was another campground further up the road that we knew of so we were going to check it out. We drove many several more discouraging miles with this as our scenery:
But then, quite suddenly, we came upon a canyon full of forest! It was oh so pretty and encouraging. So we finally arrived at Mill Flat campground. It was a big meadow in a small valley. The mountains surrounding were pretty and covered in trees. The only problem was that all the good camp spots were taken. We took one of the last ones that had a picnic table and fire pit. But it was scorching hot during the day because, like I said, we were in a big meadow. There were no water spigots in the entire campground, but right next to ours was a big trough filled with disgusting water and bugs. (Surprisingly not mosquito's). And at one end was a spout that came from a pipe in the ground and trickled spring water into the trough. So there was our water source.
So, after eating lunch we retraced our route up and posted signs (paper plates with an M for Martin written on them and arrows) at all the forks in the road so our family could follow. We had Stephanie and her kids coming from Rexburg, my parents and 3 younger brothers living at home coming from Nampa, and Chris and his family coming from Caldwell.
At one crossroads we stopped to post a sign and this pretty little blue bird came and perched on the drivers side rear view mirror. Then it attacked the bird in the rear view mirror! Then it perched to rest for a bit and then went at it again. This happened a few times. It was very entertaining. I really wish we had had the camera handy to take a picture, but we did not. I've looked it up though and think it was a Mountain Blue Bird.
And on the way back to the camp after putting up all the signs we had to stop at that spot to replace the sign that had fallen down and the bird came back! It was cool.
Okay, to minimize each posting I will not do the whole trip at once. More to come.