We had an awesome time camping! Our first camping trip with Ada who is now 2.25 yo. We had so much fun, with lots of driving, adventures & time just hanging out as a family camping, cooking, playing… She had a great time. Us too!. The best part was we rented a VW bus, which made the trip! We cooked in the bus, we pulled over road-side and had our lunch stops, we slept in the pop-up top, and Ada slept in the way back. We pitched a tent just for fun, but the bus was our adventurous home, all 17′ of it!
Our rented VW bus!
The first day we drove from Berkeley to North of Mendocino. About 5 hours in the car, including a few stops. We managed to time it pretty closely with her nap. That gave us two hours. But soon after that Ada figured out pretty quickly to say (w/o prompting), “are we here?! are we here?!”. So in the last hour, we would really have to pull out all the stops. We sang Old MacDonald, Zipadeedooda, 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed, She’ll be coming around the Mountain… everything we could think of. We pointed out everything there was to see on the road. We counted, we told stories about everything we could think of… And we invented things to entertain, many things… At one point I used a paper receipt stuck with a piece of masking tape and : taped it to my nose, to Hamid’s ear, onto a bottle and flying it in the air like bird with the receipt as its wings, then we tucked kleenex behind my ears, and under my nose like mustache, in Hamid’s ears, on his head, I put a pail on my head, made faces, and sang songs… front seat antics to keep the little girl laughing.
Our first day, we were excited to put up the tent (we didn’t sleep in it, just played bristle blocks in it before the sun went down). We tried out our cooking in the bus with a yummy dinner. And we figured out our sleeping situation, with Ada playing a new bus-game called ‘pickle’ when she was supposed to go to sleep. She would pick her head up from her pillows in the back, peek over the seat and say, “Pickle!”, then put her head back down. 5 seconds later, “Pickle!”… and on and on…, “Pickle, pickle, pickle”. Pretty funny actually. “Go to sleep, Go to sleep Ada, time to sleep”. She could tell we weren’t in too serious of a mood, and knew she could get us to laught. We were all pretty happy and tickled falling asleep in our camper bus, our first big outside adventure as a family.
Putting up the tent
Our little pickle!
Here’s a video of our night time bus adventure camping near Mendocino