When we turned off the engine of the Westy, the girls jumped off and ran into the forest. They immediately started climbing on logs and building a shelter… My little wildflowers… We were all so eager to leave the city behind…

After months in the desert, the smell of a lake in the middle of the forest was decadent. Mountain biking straight from our campsite on pine-laden single tracks, being visited a few times a day by a family of deer wondering what the heck we were doing in their living room and losing myself in thoughts by a waterfall while the girls nibbled their first dandelions of the year were just a bonus.

We read The Animal Dialogues by the bonfire in the dark (the best place to read that amazing book), drank our morning coffee in a patch of sunlight filtering through the tall cedar trees and read on the dock under the stoic gaze of a great blue heron.

There’s nothing like spitting your toothpaste in the fire, eating parsley-lemon pasta in lexan plates with a spork, walking with a headlamp to the outhouse and going to bed smelling of citronella and wood smoke to bring you back to center after an intense week.

Was it all as awesome as it sound? Hell, yeah. Maybe even a little better.

This campground is called Round Lake State Park, in Idaho. Sites 12 and 14 are huge!