Pine Lake

Okay, now I'll talk about the trip. Last week (7/24 - 8/1) we participated in the annual camping trip that Hyrum's mom's side of the family has been having since before we were born. We had a BLAST. We went to Pine Lake, which is just a little bit north of Bryce Canyon. It is such a beautiful place, and spending time with the extended family is so much fun. I love Hyrum's cousins and aunts and uncles. I don't know how I came to be so blessed when it comes to in-laws. It sure makes it easier to deal with the fact that my own family is on the other side of the country!!

Some of the highlights of the trip were a drive and then hike to the "Barney Top" - a lookout from which you can see the "four corners" states, arrowhead hunting, and a drive to the scene of a mudslide that happened last year. This was my first time arrowhead hunting, and I actually found something!! Lots of people have warned me that it is a hot, boring ordeal, but I have way too much of my mom in me to not enjoy looking at rocks and searching for evidence of those who have gone before. I would have preferred not having an overtired, overheated 3 year old in tow, but what are ya gonna do? I am having a difficult time getting decent pictures of our arrowhead finds, but when I get better ones, I will post them.

So the trip itself was great, but the ride home was the really exciting part. First off, our equalizer hitch (the bars that stabilize the trailer) wasn't adjusted quite right so we were fish-tailing a bit for the first bit of the drive. We pulled off, and Hyrum's Dad suggested that we might just want to take the bars off and use only our regular hitch. Yeah...that wasn't his greatest idea. We were then fish-tailing EVERYWHERE and white knuckling it to our lunch stop. When we did stop for lunch Hy and his brother and Dad were able to get the hitch situation figured out and the fish tailing stopped.

When we got to Payson (about 10 minutes from home via freeway) traffic came to a very sudden and complete stop. We fish-tailed a little bit again, trying to stop before we hit into Hy's Dad. We made it, came to a stop and felt a nice little THUMP! Our brother-in-law did not have as much luck as we did with stopping in time. We figured that the damage probably wasn't too bad, and we were about to narrow into one lane, so we couldn't really stop to check it out anyway. Right as the lanes merged completely, a couple pulled along side us and informed us that we were about to lose our propane tanks. We thanked them and planned to get off at the upcoming exit. As we inched along the one open lane of freeway (most of which, by the way, was over a bridge) we heard a series of sounds. The first was a scraping, then sort of a bumping, followed by a loud hiss. The sounds were then accompanied by an alarming amount of smoke. Hyrum quickly made us our own little shoulder (luckily not tipping the trailer over in the meantime) and we got our kids out of the truck and into the grass as quickly as humanly possible. As you might have already guessed, the scraping and bumping were our propane tanks dragging along the ground and the hissing came when one of them sprung a leak. My guess was that the smoke was our propane gradually mixing with the sparks that the dragging tank had produced. Amazingly, no explosion insued (other than that of my arteries exploding due to an alarming increase of blood pressure) and to truncate the story a little bit, we all made it home safely.

Other than the loss of our propane tanks, the only damage that we incurred was a little bit of smashing in of our bathroom, and a bit of splashing up from the "goody" tank. Bryant was kind enough to discover the splashes when he tried to use the bathroom while we waited for our brother in-law to exit the freeway safely, post excitement. "It's gross in here" was his answer when we inquired why it was taking him so long to pee. Trust me, Ben and Hannah, hold it till you get home.

It was a trip we will never forget =o)Enjoy the photos (don't worry, there aren't any of the bathroom situation).

View from the Barney top

The crew that hiked the Barney top, and the storm that chased them back home

Our little crew and one gnarley tree. The boys hiked all the way up and back down the trail - I was so proud!

I don't think I will ever get over the sight of this mudslide. Can you imagine the noise it must have made? The pictures don't really do it justice, but click on them so you can see them in full size and get a better idea of what this looked like. It was amazing!

Yeah, Uncle Mikey taught Bry the 'pull my finger' bit. Some day he will have grandkids and we can repay him ;-)