Opening Day!

Camp Driveway

Today was a gorgeous New England day - the perfect day to pop up the camper for the first time this year and see how she fared over the Winter!  This is always a scary moment, because the threat of mice getting in is in the back of my mind from late October through April every year. You hear the tales of campers opened up after a long winter with shredded canvas, tattered cushions and shattered camping dreams. And out where we live, the mice are plentiful. We usually poke our heads in and look for signs once or twice during the Winter but without seeing the canvas you won't know for sure until you pop it up.  And I'm happy to report that thanks to close to two full boxes of dryer sheets strategically placed in every nook and cranny we could find, the camper looked exactly the way it did when we packed it up in October.  Aside from a few mildew spots on the ceiling that wiped clean with a sponge, everything was perfect.  And the fresh scent of dryer sheets wafted through the neighborhood all afternoon!  We re-packed all of the items we'd removed from the camper last Fall in preparation for our upcoming Memorial Day trip and my husband got started on replacing our non-working air conditioner with a roof vent fan we purchased recently online.  I plan to post pictures later once that project is complete.

The kids helped with the light cleaning we had to do and had fun digging through the game drawer - and Shelby the Camping Dog ran out to the camper with that familiar, maniacal look in her eye and wouldn't come out.

Yep - everyone gets excited when we open up the camper for the first time!