How to Create a Fantastic Family Campout in Your Own Backyard

This is a sponsored post in partnership with Papa Murphy's Pizza. I was compensated but all opinions are my own.

When I was growing up, I loved camping. The idea of going somewhere out of the ordinary, setting up a fun new "room," and eating tasty food over the campfire just always excited me as a kid. I distinctly remember one time when we arrived at the campsite and went fishing at twilight. It wasn't long before we came back with fresh trout. We grilled it with bacon and the flavor was amazing. Camping is pretty much one of the greatest things you can do as a family. The problem is that there isn't always time to get everything packed up, and set aside an entire weekend to go to the lake.

The thought came to me that we don't have to go out in the woods in order to give our kids some of the experiences of camping. In fact, it's possible to surprise them by doing it all in one day in our backyard! We celebrated an early Father's Day and spent most of the time just relaxing and having fun, without even going anywhere. It was crazy how the kids just loved having a tent in the backyard. They wanted to do absolutely everything in the backyard. Read books. Yep. Play games together. Absolutely. Guess how long the whole "campground" took us to set up? About 30 minutes.

We picked up a few take-n-bake pizzas from Papa Murphy's Pizza. Our family loves them because they are so easy to make and the quality is top notch. Only this time we decided to grill them over our Big Green Egg Mini Max BBQ. We couldn't have an open campfire in our back lawn (something about fire codes), but this was just as good. We just followed the instructions for the oven, and grilled it over a pizza stone. If you have never done this, you are missing out! While our Big Green Egg was heating up, there was time to bring out a football and soccer ball and play some games!

Cooking the Papa Murphy's pizzas was an easy task. I just placed the pizza, and the cardboard tray, on the hot pizza stone. I rotated the pizza twice while it cooked. You need to keep an eye out to make
sure that the bottom doesn't burn. Each pizza took 10-15 minutes. The beauty of cooking the pizza on the Big Green Egg is that it works like a convection oven to cook food fast and evenly.

To complete the dinner, we served fresh watermelon and even broke out some special glasses just for fun. We finished by pouring chilled sparkling lemonade in the glasses and we had the makings of a terrific campout dinner! Since we were in the backyard, we used regular cups and glasses instead of disposable dishes. It makes sense not to be wasteful when it is just as easy to take the dishes in to wash them. We weren't done with the campout yet, however!

The beauty of a charcoal BBQ is that, at this point, you still have coals that are hot enough to cook S'mores on! After we cleaned up a little, we brought out our plate of S'mores supplies. We have extendable roasting sticks that are perfect for large marshmallows. It is also great for keeping kids a safe distance away from the hot grill. I was also right there next to them to make sure they followed the rules...and had tons of fun! The heat in the Big Green Egg helped to make the marshmallows crispy on the outside and perfectly "melty" in the middle.

By the end of the night, everyone was satisfied. The kids were also tired and wanted to spend the night in the tent. We let them stay up late, but in the end they slept in their own beds, mostly because us parents wanted to to sleep in our own beds as well! The overnight backyard campout will have to wait for another night.

Hopefully you were able to get some ideas to create a family backyard campout of your own. These are the memories that your kids will keep forever and pass on to their own children. So steal my ideas, think of a few of your own, and pick up some Papa Murphy's pizza while you are out running errands.

Better yet, head over to Papa Murphy's Facebook page and you can win your own Big Green Egg Grill (valued at $1,000) and a $100 Papa Murphy's gift card!