The Baranko Family: IL moved to Phase 4 of Pandemic + Camping in WI

On June 26th the state of IL moved to Phase 4 of the "Restore Illinois" pandemic risk mitigation plan, which means you could start seeing people in small groups (less than 50 people), eating at restaurants, etc. It was a bit of a lift from the stricter phases before, but not back to normal totally. We cautiously started doing things outside of the bubble we had been in for the past several months. It felt great.

I had off of work for two days the week of the 4th of July, so I decided to take the other 3 off to have a full week off. It was awesome! We went camping at a rural place in Wisconsin that Matt found on this website called Hipcamp. It is kind of like AirBnB for camping, you pay somebody a fee to camp on their private property. This place was a farm that was just a couple hours away from our house and extremely remote, which is great in social distance-land. We didn't even interact with the owners, it was all online. It was nice to get away, though (for the first time since March), and we loved our two nights of camping.

Cousins came for a visit at our house on 6/19, Otto and Kona are the same age and had a blast I'm told

Otto was neutered on 6/22, he calmed down so much after that, it was such a relief

Cone break

Cousins boat trip to the city on another weekday, they had a great day for it!

Matt helped his friend Eric charter his boat that same day, so he took another trip into the city by boat.

This was the small group Eric and Matt took out.

First Mate Matt

Selfie!

Matt took the kids to the empty Gurnee Antique Market to ride their scooters around and zoom around in the store's other wheeled things.

Strawberry picking in WI

Making strawberry jam

Quick visit on Frank's boat downtown

He docks it right next to Navy Pier

Yacht people

Got some ice cream on Navy Pier before we left

Mini golfing in the 'burbs

This dog asks himself "why lie on the ground when I can lie on a cushion?"

Beach afternoon

Luke ran into a couple friends at the beach - nice to see the socializing a bit agin

Lake Forest beach is always pretty dead

Matt borrowed my sunglasses, they look great:)

Monday morning we had our cleaning people come back for the first time since the pandemic started, so we stayed outside while they did their work. So great to have a clean house!

Camping! Setting up Matt's new Father's Day present tent.

Our campsite looked over these pretty farm fields and woods

The campsite is called Firefly because of all of the fireflies you can see from it

We travel light. Ha!

Got our tent up in time for a big storm to roll in

Quick walk around before we hunkered down

Our toilet was the portable toilet from the boat, pretty slick!

This was the toilet on the property, it was pretty gross. I preferred our toilet.

The tent is so large that we can have a table and chairs area plus our sleeping area, with room to spare

Games all sorts were played

Matt cooked our salmon on the travel grill, darting out in the pouring rain. Was great to have a hot meal, though.

We were in the middle of this giant storm system, not a drop in in the tent, though!

We may have gotten a little bored in the tent, hour after hour, but overall it was fun

It was Otto's 1st birthday! So he got some whipped cream in a bowl to celebrate

And some for Luke's mouth, apparently.

Storm has finally passed and the sunset was lovely

Still time for a campfire and s'mores

Claire absolutely LOOOOOOVED the fireflies, she sat there enthralled with how many there were, then we tried to catch them. It is such a beautiful memory.