Well, it’s more than a bit late, but Merry Christmas! We didn’t have a white Christmas but we did have some snow last weekend.

It was brighter than it looks in the photos.

The Photo CD’s are in the mail. If you ordered one, it’s on it’s way!

I promised photos and here they are!

I got Dylan to wear the Elf hat. Tom wore the Santa hat for a while.

Maybe 10 minutes in, we all stopped for a photo.

We headed straight for Bass Pro, played some at the shooting gallery, and moved on to the fish tank.

Perhaps Rhonda was thinking of trying her luck fishing the tank?

Apparently everyone was already tired and needed to rest in the first mattress store we passed.

Heh, Nicola looks goofy.

Nobody wanted to leave the mattress store, they were very comfortable, but the movie was waiting.

It may have been Thanksgiving but we at camp weren’t just sitting around enjoying the day (Well, not all day). While Rhonda and Nicola were fixing a wonderful Thanksgiving lunch, Rhonda’s brother Tony and I made a quick escape and went down to the dam to start draining the lake. The dam has an upper and a lower gate, so we started with the upper gate, opening it a little bit at a time. The upper gate is easiest, you simply turn the wheel.

After lunch we all went down to Mud Turtle and could already see significant progress. Rhonda brought her fishing pole and tried to see if she could catch any fish. Tony kept telling her that he didn’t believe there were any fish in the lake, but Rhonda tried anyway. No luck this time, but I’m sure she’ll try again after we fill the lake back up in the spring.

On Sunday Rhonda and I went down and opened the lower gate on the dam. The lower gate is a bit harder than the top one. You need to haul the gate up by a chain, and it’s heavy. Still, we opened the lower gate without a problem. The lake will stay drained until probably early spring, when it will have dried out enough for us to walk on it to thin out the brush along the bank.