[part of the Tuesday for Travel blog series – reviews, recommendations, and stories based on our travels and excursions]

Each year we renew our annual Shenandoah National Park admittance pass.  One of our favorite pastimes is cruising Skyline Drive at sunset and counting deer.  This is a particularly helpful activity after an eventful day – a long drive at sunset is like a sweet lullaby and makes for a nice and early bedtime for the boys. 🙂

We’ve been planning a camping trip to Big Meadows for quite some time.  We kept putting it off for one reason or another.  We knew we wanted to go during the summer months so that cooler temperatures wouldn’t freeze us out.  Knowing that Big Meadows has no RV hookups also delayed our trip.  In hopes of getting in our groove and figuring out how to camp for the weekend without electricity/water/sewer, we waited until a few years into our RV camping career to take the trip.

While we knew everything we should do prior to the trip – charge the battery, fill up the water tank, make sure the propane tanks were full, etc, the busy end of summer got the best of us.  We took the camper on an empty battery and set up with an empty water tank.  I’m happy to say that we still had a wonderful trip, but we’ll be more mindful next time and be sure to dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s. 🙂

The boys were introduced to ladder ball and loved it!

Chris is learning how to use the camera so that I can actually be in some pictures occasionally. 🙂

My sweet Camden.

After taking our cruiser bikes for a ride, we decided that we missed our mountain bikes! 😉 Camden took the nap that we all needed after the ride.

A short visit to the park beside Big Meadows Lodge.

The boys’ first hike to an overlook…

This is supposed to be a “thumbs up”…good try Camden. 🙂

Relaxing at the campsite.

Grammi & Paw Paw came for a visit!

Hiking to Dark Hollow Falls via the fire road – much easier for tiny legs!

We spotted a nice buck on our hike.

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– Nikki

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