Well, we did it. We had Thanksgiving at Tower Camp.
The original plan was to spend the night up there the night before, but the weather did not cooperate. We were under a hard freeze warning for Wednesday night with the temperature at camp expected to be 22 degrees.
I talked big for a while and then got real. This Florida girl does NOT camp in freezing weather.
I also chickened out about cooking everything up there. Troy was determined to cook his turkey in a bucket, but I cooked everything Tuesday night and then planned to warm it up at dinner time.
Both decisions turned out to be wise ones because I woke up Thursday morning with a terrible cold. Sore throat, bad cough, elephant on my chest – the works.
I was moving extra slow, the kids were grumpy, Troy was grumpy, and we were late leaving home. Not exactly a great start but we were moving.
I took a bunch of cold medicine and by the time we got to camp I was a little on the loopy side. At least that’s my excuse for finding the fact that my youngest got mad, took his chair, and went out into the field to sit, hysterical.
He got over whatever it was that he was mad about and showed back up a few minutes later to help get things ready.
My in-laws arrived.
Troy got his turkey cooking in the bucket.
And then it was time for some target shooting
My daughter has never wanted to shoot before, but she decided she wanted to try her grandmother’s 22. She got some pointers from her grandmother.
Some from her dad
And then my girl hit the target dead on 4 out of 6 shots. Excellent shooting!
The youngest was not happy that his aim wasn’t quite as good as his sister’s.
Uncle R shot a shotgun for the first time in years and decided that he needed to come up and shoot more often.
I bought more Shockwave and brought some flour and tomatoes so that we could have a nice Thanksgiving explosion – but that didn’t work out as planned.
The rifle I used to shoot the pumpkin has a scope on it but the rifle we had with us on Thursday is new and doesn’t have a scope yet. The Oldest spent some time trying to site in the iron sites but didn’t have much luck.
His father took over and even though he didn’t do much better he proclaimed he could make the shot.
The problem with the Shockwave is that the container must be hit right in the center or you don’t get the full effect.
The Island King was confident so we put a pound of Shockwave under a bag of flour and got ready for what we hoped would be a cool explosion.
He hit the target a little too high and all we got was this.
The bag of flour didn’t even fall over.
Which is disappointing when you’re expecting this.
Lesson learned – must have scope.
It got dark just as the turkey finished cooking, and I did not take the first picture. My cold medicine had worn off, so my energy level was running low.
We ended up with quite a spread and unbelievably that turkey was surprisingly good.
Which is surprising when you see how the bird was prepared.
The day did not go exactly as planned but we didn’t have to go to Golden Corral for dinner and there was no big hulla-ba-loo about anything, so I’d say the event was a success.
We are going to do this again but hopefully next time I won’t be sick.
