Our first camping trip of the year is in the books. We were invited to go on the season-opening trip with Stephanie & John, and a few of their friends, for Mothers' Day. One of their friends have a membership or something at a private campground near Paw Paw in Michigan, so that's where we went. Alex was working over the weekend and Natalie didn't want to take her dog camping with strangers, so Beth, Missy, and I took the camper up to the campground on Thursday after I got out of work. The GPS found us a rather out of the way path to get there, so even though we thought we might get there before dark, we did not. I guess it wouldn't be family camping if we weren't setting up in the dark. It was cool enough that the canvas on the edges of the beds on both sides split a little bit when I was setting up, so that's something I'm going to have to fix ASAP. But we got set up and had time to sit around the fire and meet some new friends. Friday morning I had to work, so I got up earlier than the others and found a quiet secluded place in the campground laundry room (there was nobody else in there) to setup a wi-fi hotspot with my phone so I could connect to the ZB intranet. I worked on a presentation and had some phone meetings for a bit, then staff meeting after that, so in all I worked until around noon before knocking off. The other guys there were working on dinner all day; they had smokers set up to make ribs. I was intrigued at first but started to realize as they were in the 7th hour of tending to the smokers that maybe I'm not all that interested in doing the smoker thing all that much. Seemed like just a way to spend all day at the campsite. Beth and I also brought the salad for everyone, and Beth made a crock pot chicken since she doesn't like ribs, and we had one of those great big collective camping feasts. The ribs were incredible I must say, but I don't think I'm going to rush out and buy a smoker real soon. After cleanup was basically campfire time for the rest of the day, until ~10:30 when someone was going to bed and yelled at the rest of us to come check out the sky in the field next to all the campers. The northern lights were going on. I'd heard that there was a huge solar storm going on now, but hadn't really paid much mind to it, until we got into the field and saw what was going on. The whole group spent the next hour or so in the field watching the sky. There were green and red and purple lights all around us! They were pretty faint with the naked eye but if you took a photo with night vision they turned out spectacular. Everyone was amazed. A couple times I literally turned around in a circle while looking up at the sky and just saying "wowwwwwwww" again and again. Two once-in-a-lifetime celestial events within a month! It rained overnight, so we were lucky that the clouds hadn't moved in yet by then. Saturday Beth and Missy and I drove into Paw Paw to find some coffee and she was interested in finding her grandfather's old house that she used to go to when in high school. She thought she knew right where it was, but it took a bit of driving around to get her bearings. Eventually we did find it. In the evening it was pizza day: one of the guys had an accessory for a normal kettle grill that turned it into a pizza oven. That, I might be interested in getting one of myself. He made the dough for everyone and flattened it out, and everyone brought their own sauce and toppings. He'd hand off the dough to the next in line, they would top it how they wanted, and John would bake it (each one took maybe 2-3 minutes). Then another big collective camping feast! After campfire time, the northern lights were reportedly supposed to be even more spectacular than Friday night, but there wasn't anything really going on in the sky that we saw. Everyone packed up and headed home Sunday. We left for home around lunchtime.