Family Traditions – Fall Picnic in the Woods

This past weekend B and I packed up the boys and the camper and met up with my brother and his wife for a fall camping weekend at a nearby state park.   This October camping weekend is a tradition that we started years ago but due to weather and life, it’s been a few years since we’ve taken this trip together.  

For this year’s camping trip, I thought it would be fun to incorporate a few traditions from our childhood and while the weather didn’t cooperate fully for us to do the actual picnic, I still really wanted to do a few fun things to make the trip more special and memorable.

One of the fun things about camping at parks like this is the great fire ring because you can easily cook over your fire.  For this trip we decided to cook a large pot of vegetable beef soup in our dutch oven, with italian bread toasted with butter in foil over the file to make it warm and buttery all the way through!

Fall picnics will forever hold a special place in my heart because that was a tradition my family did together growing up.  Every year my parents would take my brother and I for a fall picnic at a different state park where we’d have a meal and then we’d stop by a farmer’s roadside stand for pumpkins, apples, cider and indian corn.  This was always such a fun day for us walking in the woods, a coolness in the air, the smells of autumn filling our noses. I truly believe these memories are part of why I love fall so much as an adult.

For our picnic this past weekend, the rain kept us from going far from our campers but I decorated our table with a fall tablecloth, some fake pumpkins.  I carved out some apples to drink our cider out of and of course the steamy soup warmed our insides.

Not the fall picnic I imagined in my head but the food was good, the company even better and the time away with B and family will remain happy memories for us to look back on years from now.