Christmas Eve Hike at Harvey Bear Ranch

Coyote Lake – Harvey Bear Ranch County Park was created in 2005 when the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department struck a deal with the Harvey Bear family to preserve the families land as a multi-use park and additional greenbelt in the Santa Clara Valley, just south of San Jose.

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What are Your Favorite Family Camping Activities?

mountain-streamAs the year draws to a close, I’m looking forward to all the great camping trips we have planned for the coming year and I wonder what new experiences are in store for us. I don’t know if we’re disorganized or just easy going, but we never have a pre-planned agenda, when we head-off on our outdoor excursions. If we spend an afternoon skipping rocks across a stream or hiking some backcountry trail, everybody is having a pretty good time (okay, my younger two are probably whining at the two-mile mark, if we’re hiking!).

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Get the Family Outside this Weekend

snow-play-areaDecember is finally here and if you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping yet, then you probably have big plans to hit the malls this weekend to get it finished. You can do yourself and your family a favor, though, by shopping online or squeezing that last minute shopping in during the week, so you’re free to enjoy the weekend with your family, instead. Here are five great ways to get the family outside this weekend.

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Camping on the High Seas

If you had told me six months ago that I’d be spending Thanksgiving with my family on a cruise ship, I’d have thought you were crazy. We usually spend that week camping at the beach and, after all, we’re still a bit young for the cruise ship scene. Or so I thought.

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Reluctant Camper to Responsible Parent

campire-kidsI just spent the weekend in Fayetteville, NC with a dozen of my fellow Paratroopers, who served with me in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. They had seen CampingBlogger.net and several commented on how once they had vowed never to sleep on the ground again, once they had gotten out of the Army.

Interestingly, I too shared this attitude when I returned to civilian life. Understand that in the five years I served (some of my friends are still serving, which is amazing), we had been bitten by ants in the jungle, bitten by flies in the desert and bitten by the bitter cold in the Arctic. Five years of this could leave anyone a bit jaundiced to the idea of camping in the outdoors.

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