Wallace 2023....I might be done

 Oh Wallace. 

You started out innocently enough, then you morphed into a whole thing.

We've been going to Wallace since 2016. This was our 8th year. 

We've seen in grow and become almost unmanageable...kids running wild, teenagers flirting and "fighting", splinter groups going for hikes and pick-up football games, moms napping in hammocks. 

Now the teenagers are adults and off gaining educations or getting married. The littles are moving into the teenage space and claiming their own firepits each night so they can have conversations outside of parental earshot.  Little do they know we are happy to give them their space.

It makes me wonder how many more years we will go out to Wallace.

This year it was just me and AJ and Everly. Mark promised to come up for a night and wanted to use his barrel smoker to make some burnt ends. Whatever works! 

Other families have shrunk down...the Flynns had no kids there at all but made up for it with a new puppy, the Peterson's were just Amy and Syd, Jensons just Heather and Katie. We're still missing the Guenthers. 

It was...quiet.

The food was still on point. 

Whenever I looked around and the girls were missing, I could find them in the truck doing their makeup!

We didn't realize at the time the bees...the bees weren't actually bees. They were hornets pretending to be bees and soon they would have their revenge!

The girls caught this floppy little snake that was definitely just "sleeping".

They spent many hours down at the Clay Wall, carving steps into it and gathering little dry bricks to

 work with back at camp. That sent me on several solitary walks down the creekbed to make sure they were still not kidnapped.

Hooray! Mark arrived and promptly engaged in manly bbq pursuits. We were all happy to hover nearby to enjoy the spoils.

I'm a total sucker for a late-night camping book. Everly is super committed to her reading fluency...SUPER committed. 

While the adults chatted away at a separate fire, the young toiled and ground down the clay... sculpters gotta sculpt. 

That was the last photo I took...I didn't know that the next day would bring an attack of the "bees". They weren't just after our open soda cans of syrup drips, they wanted us. I got stung on the arm and AJ got one on the finger and the leg. We packed as early and as quickly as we could to avoid the warm part of the day, when the little buttheads seemed to really emerge en masse. 

In the end, we pretty much frantically toseed everything haphazardly in the back of the truck and tried to drive out of beeshot. We pulled over to strap everything down and the bees were still looking for us. 

Fair to say, not really our favorite year at Wallace. It might actually be our last year at Wallace!

Time will tell.