Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Our Camping Trip

(as a side note, all of these pictures are clickable. You are not seeing the entire picture here in the blog, so you probably want to click every picture instead of just the left half)


Every Labor Day weekend since I've known J, his family has done a huge camping trip in the High Uintas. They used to camp in the East Fork of the Bear boy scout campground, but since they started charging way more than surrounding areas and the boys bought ATVs, we just go near the camp. We usually go to the mountain man rendezvous in Fort Bridger, WY, but we decided to skip it this year.


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We left Thursday, and found a wonderful camping spot. The weather was beautiful, in the low sixties.
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Thursday afternoon, we had a huge bull moose come visit.
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We had to get a big spot because Jim's sister, brother, parents, and my parents were all coming, along with misc. children and dogs. We had a total of 11 children ages 10 and under, and 3 dogs, as well as 10 adults.
Here is my parents' brand new puppy, aka "Uncle Sam" to my kids, and my new "little brother".
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Last year, our camping spot had a really cool "hut", so we decided to build an even bigger and better one this year. The kids LOVED playing in it.
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Z learned how to say "Ride", "car", and "go!". He was absolutely obsessed with the ATVs and would constantly hang around the rhino, yelling "ride" over and over again. We could've sworn he even said, "Poppa, I want to go for a ride!"
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The trip wasn't without bad luck. My parents got a feeling that they needed to leave Sunday evening, instead of Monday after lunch as originally planned. Right as they finished packing up, it started to rain. Hard. The rain continued all night, turning to snow around 4am. Our battery died in the night, so no heat. E & N borrowed my parents' tent trailer. We hadn't re-caulked the roof in a couple years so it began to leak. Then, they ran out of propane, so no heat for them either. J&J had their furnace make a really scary explosion sound before bed sunday night, and no heat for them either. The snow the next morning was beautiful, even if it was very cold and wet.
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About 6:30am, E&N had decided they had enough fun, so they packed up and went home. On the way home, they had carsick kids, and horrible weather. In the horrible weather, they ended up hitting something in their truck. Their truck was fine, but it unfortunately put a big dent in my parents' tent trailer.

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Jim's parents caravaned home with us. It ended up being a good thing for them, as G left her purse at the restaurant we stopped at for lunch. Since we hadn't left yet, we were able to grab it and meet them at a ranch exit and give it (fully intact) to her. Not ten minutes later, they had a trailer tire blow. Their spare was pretty low on air, but J has an air compressor that hooks up to the battery, so he was able to fill it up and help his dad change the tire.

Bad luck notwithstanding, I had a wonderful time, and really enjoyed spending all of the quality time with our families.

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