As many of you know, Chris and I celebrated out fifth anniversary this year by heading out on a camping adventure, sans kiddos.  Yes, that's right.  Supporting us in this endeavor where the wonderful and talented babysitter tag-team of Pam Jensen (Pamaw), my mom (Mamaw) and my Aunt Tammy.  It certainly does take "a village," but we couldn't have done it without them.  Thanks to all of them for sacrificing their weekends so that we could go and play.

We started out on Friday evening a little before 5 pm, neither one of us thinking about rush hour traffic.  So, it took us over an hour to get out of Indianapolis.  Not a good omen, but our spirits were high, conversation was good and iPods were charged.  Our travels finally got underway when the gallon of Gatorade I drank during the traffic jam started to become a problem.  We were on some winding, curvy road, surrounded by nothing.  And I mean nothing.  So, we found a side street (if you want to call it that) so I could hop out and get back to my roots in the forest.  Turns out that some old guy sees Chris pulled off of the road, sitting there by himself, and stops to ask if he needs anything.  Chris declines and the guy drives off as I come tearing out of the forest.  He-he!

We got to Clifty Falls, set up our tent and started a fire.  Actually I was trying to start the fire while Chris set up the tent.  My amazing fire starting talent (Girl Scouts, baby!) that wooed Chris on our first camping trip five years ago was not so magical this time.  It took us almost an hour to get our fire going and another hour or so to cook our dinner.  We finally sat down to a burnt hobo dinner at 10:30 pm.  It was the best burnt hamburger I have ever eaten.  It didn't really matter though, relaxing around the fire was enough.

On Saturday we got up and made waffles.  A much better experience than the previous night's food.  We then set off to hike.  Clifty Falls has some amazing hiking trails, most of which are "rugged."  They got the heart pumping and it felt so good to be out in the wild getting a little exercise.  I also found out my husband is overly talented in skipping rocks.  Seriously, I have never seen anyone skip rocks like my man!  We came back to the camp site to get cleaned up and eat lunch.  I pulled the French bread sandwich out of the cooler only to watch water pouring off of it.  Not a good sign.  The entire sandwich was a soggy disaster, so we ate our hearts out on delicious corn on the cob made on the grill.  We then showered and headed into Madison.

Our first stop was the Lanthier Winery for a little wine tasting and culture.  It was a cute little winery with a very nice semi-sweet red wine.  We bought some wine and headed to the shopping district to browse.  Madison is a very cute little home-grown kind of town.  We enjoyed dinner in town (yeah!) at a little Italian café.  We then headed back to camp for the evening.  Of course this time our fire was going in about two seconds since we weren't trying to cook on it.  The rest of the evening we spent enjoying wine and playing games.

On Sunday we got up and did some more hiking before packing up.  We stopped in town again for some lunch and then were on our way.  About 30 minutes south of Indianapolis we ran into another traffic jam due to a truck on fire.  So, we set for 45 minutes in traffic on the way home. 

We had such a wonderful time, with amazing weather, but we were glad to get home and see the girls.  We kept talking about how much they would have liked some of the stuff we got to do (mostly Avery - camping would be a nightmare for Mia). 

And so we start the sixth year...