Abby's First Official Outing!

Well, it was six months in the making, but Miss Abby's first official outing came THIS WEEKEND!! Weeks of prepping and planning, a billion Pinterest posts consulted...and then it was here! I thought I'd tell you about it today! I might tell you a few more things about it throughout this week - thinking out loud from other angles, if you don't mind. 

I had a speaking engagement this weekend (one postponed from last year and all carefully distanced) so we decided to take Abby with us and make this our first camping trip!

And so it was that Friday morning we did our official pre-trip photo shoot...

...and then we headed out!

We had a GORGEOUS day to travel...though it was incredibly windy. So Ryan learned right away how to hang onto the RV in a strong wind!

Hello, Ohio!!!

My speaking engagement was held at a state park, and this is the beautiful lodge where it was held!

We stopped in at the lodge, but literally just a few minutes after I took this picture, we headed toward the campground, which apparently was in a completely different climate!

It was our first time ever to check into a campground, of course we had to do it in a torrential downpour. Of course! We had no idea what all was required of a check-in...but it turned out to be pretty easy. We had registered for this site several months ago, so the lady at the little building basically just pointed us to the correct road and told us to have a great visit. :) 

And by the time we drove around the bend and down the road, the rain had stopped and the sun was shining again. GO FIGURE!

Our little campsite was simple but perfect for our needs. We only had electricity at this site - not water. But we were going to be in and out all weekend, so it was actually much easier to only have electricity. Didn't have nearly as much too plug in and unplug when we needed to move around. (We had to drive Abby everywhere we needed to go, because we didn't tow our car.) We had a picnic table and fire ring, and this beautiful sight out our front window:

Ryan had picked our spot at random, and of course we'd never been to this place before, so we knew nothing about any of the spots. But this was so pretty! And I was so grateful for the gorgeous bright green baby leaves and the blossoms. Perfection. 

We were probably a pretty boring campsite compared to others, because we didn't truly set up camp. We didn't have flagpoles or welcome signs at the edge of our drive or a dog run throughout the yard. (We didn't even bring our rug...but we do have one!) But we thoroughly enjoyed our spot.

Unfortunately, it rained THE ENTIRE WEEKEND. It was okay, since we had plenty to do, but when we were at the campground, we were limited on our outdoor activity! 

I'll have to tell you more about life IN Abby on another day, but I will show you this one snippet of time we got to enjoy a fire in our fire pit before the rain drowned it.

Saturday evening the radar showed NO rain, so we made a fire.

(Don't you love the giant mud puddle next to it? That was our only sadness over our site. The other sites all seemed to have grass or gravel around the fire pit. Not so much for us.)

We had our coffee outside, because of course...

And then we sat a mud puddle's distance from our fire to wait for it to get marshmallow-ready.

It was pretty perfect...

...until literally halfway through our marshmallow roasting. All of the sudden the skies opened and it rained the rest of the night. We scrambled to get inside with half-roasted marshmallows, which made for awkward s'mores. 

And that was the extent of our true campground adventures with Abby. We didn't even get to hike the park on Sunday like we'd hoped, because the rain game was still going strong throughout that day. But even though it was unconventional, we had a great time. I'll tell you more tomorrow, but I just had to tell you today that she's officially had her debut!!