Cloudcroft New Mexico

Mountains, mountains you say? After a year of living in west Texas I had almost forgotten what mountains looked like.  So when our friends invited us to go to a place with an elevation of over 8000 feet complete with pine trees, cool breezes and a stream (yes a stream full of water! Did I mention we live in west Texas?) we had to go.  The drive was about four hours from where we live plus add in the kid factor of one extra hour for potty breaks, 2 year old I can't sit in this car seat for one more minute tantrum, and a quick lunch break altogether it was around five hours but wasn't too bad of a driving experience. We went the first week of June and the wild flowers alone along the way were worth the drive.  

We camped. With three children. In a tent.  What I have to say about camping with kids is if you have never done it before, do a one night trip first.  My husband and I both grew up camping a lot with our families so we know what to do, how to set things up, what to pack and what to cook.  We are both pretty good at camping. Now having said that I need to say that we don't really enjoy camping. It is a ton of work from packing to unpacking and everything in between.  Add watching a fearless wandering two year old into that and it's not really a vacation for us anymore but an "experience". We camp for our kids because we both have wonderful warm and fuzzy memories of camping with our families when we were growing up and we want our kids to make similar memories.  As my husband likes to say after an exhausting day of camping, "we had our time as kids, it's their time now".  More about camping with kids in a later post.  Now on to Cloudcroft, New Mexico and what makes it a great Family Vacation Time.

The views are gorgeous. This was the view from our tent spot.  The kids played in this meadow for hours.  In the morning and evening we watched deer (and they watched us) slowly roam through here munching on grass. Our kids thought it was better than watching T.V.

Below is the view from a nearby waterfall. (Remember we were promised a stream)

Promised waterfall