Camping at John Johnson Farm

A few families from our ward decided to go camping at the John Johnson property in August. I was only 7 months pregnant, and the last camping trip went so fantastically, so why not?
After driving about 45 min northeast of Akron to a small town called Hiram (and by small, it's even small to Trent who is from a 'small town'), you take a country lane road further east until you run out of houses along the lane and come upon a large farm on the north. Don't pull into their visitor center parking lot, you turn before you come to the Johnson Barn house and follow this long road down into the trees. Once you get into the trees, everything is well marked out. Clean bathrooms (at least clean for outdoor camping standards), space for parking, a covered patio with ELECTRICITY outlets (you can bring a griddle for pancakes, a giant screen for a movie projector, etc), charcoal grill and separate firepit and wide open space cleared out for tents. Nice set up. The Church owns it and almost all of the Young Women have their yearly Stake Campout here. Last year we had heavy rains that flooded the area so they had to relocate to the nearby church and set up their sleeping bags inside the Relief Society, Primary and other rooms.

The kids slept soundly. Trent and I? Hmmm, not so very soundly. We were woken up every 2 hours the whole night through.

Carter caught some kind of lizard and woo-ed all the kids with it. Kyleigh couldn't wait for her turn! (She is an equal opportunist...dolls, lizards...it's all the same to her).

Boys did their flashlight, insect, exploring thing (above)
Girls did their rock jumping balancing thing (below)

Ample parking, but that also means lots of 'customers'. There is a small fee, but it's very minimal, and when sharing with 5 other families, it's a very good deal for the quality and cleanliness of the area. There was also a sand Volleyball pit, but we didn't make it up there. 

Moms were packing bags and picking up food from the patio while the Dads were taking down the tents.

Kids liked playing with the flashlights, the guys liked playing catch with the football. The women all brought tin foil dinners for the evening (I ended up making baked sandwiches ahead of time and just wrapped them completely in tin foil to warm in the coals, with some dutch oven peach cobbler for dessert) and we had a mix of cereal, donuts and fruit for the morning breakfast. Fine camping cuisine.

It was actually my birthday as well as one of the kids-Carter B-so Rachel had baked cupcakes and brought candles to sing to us. It was real sweet. We had some extra families who came for the tin foil dinner and campfire chat, but they left when it was bedtime. Camping families were Tefteller, Blanchard, Wright and Macey and Dinner/Campfire families were Van Bibber and Vallen. Really fun group of people. Wish I had taken some pictures at night when everyone was around, eating, chatting, telling stories and reminiscing instead of just in the morning when we're all packing up to go home.

The After-Party scene....

We were told to hit the local ice cream joint on the way home....but the sign lied...it was closed:(
A creamery with Hand Dipped Ice Cream, cheese and butter!!! We may have to come back sometime.