Memorial Day weekend was a very busy weekend for us.  It's funny how you can get some time off and take a small "vacation" but it ends up being much less relaxing than it should be.  After giving Nathan vitamin C all week and taking Airborne every day for myself, we were feeling well enough by the weekend to go on our little camping trip we had planned.  So we packed up our things and headed north on the Parks Highway to Denali National Park.  I was very excited as Denali is one of the top National Parks I've always wanted to visit!  I never really imagined I would one day be able to make a 3 hour drive from my house to get there, how crazy is that!  For those of you who don't know, I've had a goal for many years now to visit all of the National Parks in the United States...we will see, I have a lot more to go.  Anyway, on our way up we had many spectacular views of Denali, or Mt McKinley as many people call it.  It was a wonderfully clear day and the mountain was highly visible, but I figured we would be able to take plenty of pictures when we reached the main entrance to the park farther north so I didn't bother stopping anywhere.  Well, it turns out that you can't actually see Denali from the main part of the park where we stayed.  I was very disappointed, especially since on our way back down, the mountain was almost completely concealed in clouds!  I have been kicking myself since, but I figure we will likely make it up there again a few more times before we leave Alaska.  
Anyway, we made it up and set up camp in the campground.  I was happy that I had had the foresight to buy some firewood in the valley before we left because up there they were selling these tiny bundles for $8!  They weren't even big enough to burn for an hour.  They must make a killing on that, though, because there is really nowhere to go to get wood up there unless you already have some with you.  Same with every other convenience, which is why we really thought it out to make sure we had most everything we would need so we wouldn't have to pay the ridiculous inflated prices.  When I checked in at the campground, I was informed that just the day before there had been a grizzly just down the road from there.  As though I weren't already on edge enough about bears.  Thankfully, Congress made it legal to carry a loaded weapon in National Parks a few years back, so we brought our .45-70 with us.  However, there really aren't that many problems with bears and they have never had any serious bear related incidents in that park.  Still, I didn't want to be the first.  On that topic, I had a serious need to use the restroom at around 2am the first night, and even though it could hardly be called dark out at the time, if someone happened to see me creeping up to the restroom they probably had a good laugh because I was very skittish about the whole thing hahah.  

We did a little hiking and looked around at the various visitor's attractions in the main area of the park.  Unfortunately, we forgot to bring Nathan's back carrier which would have made hiking much easier.  However, being almost 8 months pregnant, I am in no real shape to be doing any serious hiking myself, so even if we had the back carrier we probably wouldn't have done much more.  We saw some snowshoe hares and a moose with two newborn calves.  It was rather hot up there, in the 80s or so the first day.  The second day was pretty comfortable, but we've developed a new definition of hot now that we've been through an Alaskan winter.  We had a fire and roasted hotdogs and marshmallows.  It was a little miserable trying to get Nathan to settle down at night and go to sleep, but for the most part we had a pretty good time.  Here are some pictures from the trip:

 

        

  

The last picture is supposed to be Denali, but it is shrouded in clouds and all you can see are the mountains in the foreground.  Oh well, maybe next time. 

On Memorial Day we finally decided to buy a patio furniture set and had it set up in time to have dinner out on our deck.  Mike grilled pork chops and it was really nice to be able to eat outside.  Nikita was certainly loving it!  We also bought paint for the two remaining rooms we want to paint.  Maybe we will be able to get to one of them this weekend.  We will probably do Nathan's room first, and then the guest room.  Thankfully, they are much smaller than our bedroom was so it shouldn't be nearly so much work!  I am anxious to get them done, but I am not looking forward to all the taping and mess that always comes with painting.  It can be such a pain and I'm sure Nathan will be trying to get into everything this time since he is walking.