We went camping to Neurum Creek Bush Retreat again. One of my cousins had asked just before our last trip if we wanted to go for a weekend in August, and since we could only stay for one night last time, we decided to go back – and this time, to try for three nights.

To explain this, I’m not a camper. I didn’t grow up going camping, and most of my camping experiences was short trips as an adult to Fraser Island (that’s how much I love that island, I agreed to sleep in a tent if that meant that I got to go there). So I think this three night camping trip might have been my longest camping trip ever, and our longest with kids.

So how did it go? GREAT!

Maybe it was the combination of people that we had with us, or that we knew what the place was like and what to expect, or that the adults had nothing to attend to and we could give the kiddos lots of attention, or just that the moon was right and the winds aligned (the weather was pretty good actually!), it was an awesome weekend.

There was lots of visiting other camp sites (my cousin’s dog was a hit with the kids), bike riding, exploring along the creek, more bike riding and going on some walks. I’d packed colouring-in books and pencils, and games to play but they were only used on the final morning when I was trying to keep the kiddos in one spot while I did some packing up.

This was at the Archer Camping area in the D’Aguilar National Park. There was a really nice open, grassy camping area, toilets and a short walk to this creek. It would be a great place to camp for tent camping.

We went for a walk in the National Park nearby (lead by a friend who does lots of National Park walking). We didn’t quite get to where we aimed to due to little legs giving out but we did have a picnic at this spot. Views like this always have me pricing up real estate and wondering what sort of job I could get this far away from a city!

“Why is this leave spotty?” was a question that took a lot of discussion. We found another spotty leaf but those spots were tiny and insect eggs (we think). A tree disease? A fungus? It just is?

I was off Facebook for most of the weekend (not trying to make a connectedness or back to nature statement, just trying to save my downloads for my work commute) so missed an announcement in the rock hunting group that there was someone else staying at the camp ground that was doing a rock drop.

We had taken some rocks along with us – I’d intended to do a rock hunt for us around our campsite, then drop the rocks around the camp ground once we were done, but the kids only wanted them to hide them for other people. They came back from a long adventure walk with their dad with the pink and purple rocks, then we went to hide our rocks and found the two spotty ones on our way back from doing our own rock drop.

One of my kids likes to do super obvious rock drops – placed on a camp site marker was the preferred spot. The other likes to do super tricky spots like buried under a pile of leaves, and I had to explain that although it was fun to have tricky hiding spots, making them too tricky would mean that the rocks would never get found.

There were so many children around that all the rocks were found by the time we did another lap around to look for other rocks that weren’t ours – all except for one that hidden in a prickly bush. I moved it a few hours later on our way back from movie night, and it was found the next morning by the child who wasn’t the one who hid it, and he was delighted with his find of, “one of our rocks but not where we hid it!”.

I’m not sure where or when our next camping trip is going to be, but we’re looking forward to going again!