Photos left to right: The pasta mishap. Loon family.

Preserve your memories through photos and journals, especially if they include your family!
 
If you’ve been camping long enough, then surely you have stacked up some memorable moments tied to your adventures. Perhaps it’s a hike or a paddling trip, a big fish or a wildlife encounter. Children and pets, of course, lend themselves to special moments that carry on throughout our lifetimes.
 
My wife Adrienne and I maintain a journal of our camping trips and hope you do, too. Each year during camping season, and sometimes in the off-season, we look back through our journals and recall many special memories. Here are a few of ours. 
 
Dirty Pasta
My wife’s sister will be the first one to tell you she’s a tad clumsy. Once, while draining pasta outside for a big spaghetti dinner, the strainer slipped out of her hand and the pasta went on the ground. With no alternate plan, and several mouths to feed (and my wife and mother-in-law’s extra special meatballs), our only option was to wash the pasta and serve it; albeit on the crunchy side. Everyone survived, but my sister-in-law has yet to live it down after all these years. 
 
Loons
We primarily camp and paddle in the Adirondacks, which means we see and hear a lot of loons. I also try my best to photograph them. Some of my best shots have happened while participating in the annual New York Loon Census, in mid-July. One year I was fortunate to observe and photograph a pair of adult loons with two chicks. They let me get surprisingly close, so I just played it cool and snapped as many photos as I could.  
 
Big, Little Kids
We once had a family reunion of sorts at one of our summer campsites. My brother’s son and his family were visiting from California and my nephew, Grady, was 7 at the time. 
 
Grady’s dad and I were wading in knee-deep water, catching up on things, and boy’s dad was encouraging him to swim out a little deeper. But Grady was apprehensive, even with a life vest on. 
 
Then I told him that all weekend a bunch of kids had been swimming to a boat mooring pilot about 30 feet from us. 
 
“Were any of them seven?” he asked me. 
 
“I think a couple were six,” I told him. 
 
Splash, kick, splash! Off went Grady to the deeper water, as his dad and I watched and chuckled. 
 
Moment in the Moment
Several years ago, while camping in the Adirondacks, we were joined by our friends who had a young daughter named Emily, who was perhaps age 5 or 6 at the time. Sitting around the campfire, we heard a barred owl and its infamous “Who cooks for you” hoot, which I explained to Emily. A few weeks later, while talking with her Dad, he laughed as he mentioned how the family was watching TV one night when an owl came on the screen. 
 
“Who cooks for you,” Emily said! 
 
Apparently, the campfire lesson stuck with the youngster. 
 
Dan Ladd is the Editor of New York Outdoor News. He also hosts a bi-weekly podcasts which you can listen to at www.outdoornews.com/radio.
 
Unless otherwise noted, photos for this story provided by and copyright of Dan Ladd.