July 4th Weekend

WARNING: very long and boring travelogue.

Dan had to work in Utah on Friday so we decided to spend the holiday weekend there since his company was paying for gas and a hotel one night.

I searched for a campsite the week before but couldn't find anything available in Idaho or Utah but we took our tent-trailer with hopes of snagging one of the few walk-up sites. Dan woke up early Friday morning and drove the whole Alpine Loop. Nothing was available. I was stressing out because I really wanted to camp and really didn't want to have pulled the trailer five hours for nothing. My friend Amy came to the rescue. She is efficient. Everyone needs a friend like her. She found us a site that the campground host said she would hold if we came right away. Well, when we got there the site was no longer available because of a fallen tree. But! they were able to get us a spot in a different campground near Solitude.

We lived in Lehi for five years and never camped in the mountains surrounding us. They are pretty.
The kids actually wanted me to take pictures of them.
So I did.

Watching the very redneck but very nice people set up camp. Playing tigers on the rocks.

Playing around on the slack line. Riding bikes.

Saturday morning Dan rode his bike down the canyon then back up. Then I rode my mtn. bike over to Solitude and hopped on a trail.

We met Amy and her family in Sandy for fireworks. When we got back to the campground at 10:30 the gate was closed. We had never noticed the closable* gate or the sign telling us about it. We didn't want to drive 30 minutes back down the canyon because it was late and we had paid for the night but our site was too far to walk with three sleeping children.

So we pulled out the sign and placed it over the wrong-way-do-not-enter-tire-puncturing-spikes and drove over. (Photos were taken the next morning. Dan wasn't able to find the hole out of which he pulled the sign.**)

We drove back to Sandy for church on Sunday then Kyle and Angela came up to visit us.

We had dinner--including roasted corn-on-the-cob. And we roasted marshmallows. Very, very big marshmallows. And we made smores with strawberries. So good.

Those marshmallows are ridiculously big.

We also played Frisbee golf.

Kyle is great with kids. See him carrying Stella on his shoulders? I discovered later that she had peed her pants. Sorry, Kyle.

I used our Lagoon bounce-back passes on Monday for a few hours while Dan worked. Then we drove home. The weekend turned out great. If I ever move back to Utah I think we'll camp closer to home more often.

Hmmm...there is a lot of camping near Boise. I guess we should try that out too.

*Not a word.

**I do not end sentences with prepositional phrases.