To celebrate this cutie’s 7th birthday, we headed to Hunting Island State Park for our third family tent camping trip.
We’re practically pros at this point, right?! This was by far the most prepared I’d felt, but we still had a few mishaps, of course!
For one, the monsoon when we woke up on his actual birthday made it impossible to cook breakfast. We wound up with McDonald’s for breakfast (insert laughing emoji). He was THRILLED to have gotten fast food on his day, though, so not entirely a fail.
The biggest issue we encountered, however, was that the sand spurs at this place were beyond awful. The kids were constantly covered, we had to pick them out of their shoes and clothes the entire time. If you’re camping with grown ups who are content to relax at the campsite instead of roll around and chase each other through the grass, it probably won’t be as big of a deal for you. However, we just aren’t in that stage of life yet.
This was my favorite location we’ve stayed so far. The primitive sites are just steps from the beach, and the bathrooms were close by and very well maintained. Hearing the ocean while you fall asleep outside is just really hard to beat!
This was our first experience “primitive” camping. Most families would probably handle this “off-the-grid” easily. However, our kids manage their type one diabetes using several devices that must stay charged. We found we were able to make it through the two nights using three backup battery chargers. I even boosted my own phone a couple of times. The one that seemed to work best was the Heyday brand. I don’t know the exact model we have, but I found a similar one at Target for just $10 dollars.
Since we visited in November, the tent camping side of the campground was pretty deserted. This was lucky, because the site we had booked had a giant anthill built up onto the tent pad. The campground staff was really helpful in allowing us to switch to the next site. Then, before we even had our tent set up, someone was already at our original site handling the ants.
This was a pretty laid-back trip for us. Other than the McDonald’s birthday breakfast run, we didn’t leave the park. The kids enjoyed playing on the beach for a couple of hours, and we drove down to the park’s nature center and boardwalk.
Other than that, the kids just enjoyed running around the empty expanse behind the tent and periodically coming over to us for sand spur removal. We did get a couple new fun purchases for this trip. First, a nature scavenger hunt, which was great to keep the kids busy while mom & dad packed up. We also bought some packets to change the color of the campfire flames, but I didn’t think they were so impressive.
We would definitely stay here again. There’s a site I have my eye on for next time, too, but apparently the word is out that it’s amazing and it’s booked up frequently. We also didn’t get a chance to hike down to the lighthouse, so I missed my chance to hunt for Bigfoot! Maybe we will do that next time!
All in all, a really great trip to celebrate a really amazing kid. You can read about some of our other family tent camping adventures here!
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