Gooseberry Falls . . .

We bought our little explorer her first backpack for the trip.
Now she can carry her own snacks!

A week and a half ago, we ventured north of Duluth to Gooseberry Falls with Anja's Godfather, Mark. Half way through the trip we decided that Uncle Mark was a name more suited to him as he's like family to us. We wanted to camp with him at least once before he heads off to Colorado for graduate school at DU. He was nice enough to car camp with us. We're coming around to the fact that we're going to be car camping a lot for the next few years, which has both perks and drawbacks!

Our site was great (site #62---reserve it well in advance), fully surrounded by trees (which helped keep Anja from running in and out of the road like last time), and was quite spacious. We did a lot of reading, kicking the soccer ball around, took a short hike, told stories around the fire, and in general, did a lot of relaxing. It was nice to get away from the buzz of continuous technology for a few days.

The chipmunks at our site were pretty friendly (come on people, don't feed them!). We were shooing them one afternoon telling them to "get out of here" and Anja picked up on it. Pretty soon she was shouting, "Get outta here, chipmunks!" over and over. She's been our little echo lately. I guess it's time to really watch what we're saying! We've started to spell words because she doesn't seem to miss anything!

Thanks for a great trip, Mark! Looking forward to more in the future!

Anja with Mark on the "shores" of Lake Superior.

Skipping (and throwing) rocks with Erik.

At the end of our hike we found a cave and practiced blowing the whistle on her backpack.