Antlers National Recreation Area - Lake Shasta

We are back from camping! We had a great time. I had forgotten how relaxing camping is once you get there and settle in. It was just what we needed.
We got into camp about 3:30 on Wednesday. It was hot, but not bad. Our site was amazing!! Brian and I both over research everything when it comes to vacations, and we had spent a lot of time researching campgrounds, and looking at individual camp sites on a website Brian found. You can look at each site's picture. Even though its hard to tell from a picture, we looked for things like how close are the sites to each other, can you see the garbage cans or the bathrooms or any trails leading to the bathrooms, are there trees for shade and the kids to climb....yeah, we are that thorough. It paid off!! Our site was a double site, and we could have easily fit 4 or 5 tents in it. Totally shaded, and with temps reaching 105, that was needed! We had a meadow w/trees on one side, thick forest on the other side, and the lake behind us. No neighbors close at all. Tons of Manzanita trees for the kids to climb. A trail down to the lake, although it required climbing skills beyond what my 'mothers instinct' was comfortable with. We did it the first day, and that was enough. We had lots of lizards during the day scampering around, which the kids loved. Ground squirrels, too. At night, we had lots of bird sounds and crickets. We had owls swooping through camp at night, and I was able to get pretty close to one and get a picture.
Although this is a no frills campground, we loved it. The first 2 nights, there was maybe 4 campers in the whole campground. It was so quiet and relaxing. We drove through 3 or 4 of the other campgrounds in the area. They were more resort-ish. Lots of people, sites close together and not private at all, right on the lake so you had tons of boats and noise and just a lot of commotion in general. The other campgrounds had things like pools, wi-fi, volleyball, stores.....more KOA type set ups. But, Antlers National Recreation Area (which is not Antlers Marina and Campground) is much quieter. There are no frills. There are no showers, flush toilets are at the far ends of the campground, everything in the middle is pit toilets in nice buildings that don't have lights, which is what we used. Unless it was the middle of the night, then we found some nice bushes.
Camp life itself we pretty nice, too. We mostly fished and swam all day, then roasted hot dogs for dinner, had smores, played cards, watched the stars...camping stuff. Brian made the kids pancakes and bacon in the mornings, and we had sandwiches for lunch. We kept it pretty simple, but we had a great time!
I will be getting the pictures up here....but here are a few for now.The top picture is the site from the front, the one below is from the back of the site.


The water was so warm! The boats would make waves that stirred up the clay, thus the brown water, but the kids had a blast riding the wake.