Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Camping Gone Wrong

Jeremy and I have been dying to go camping! We bought our very own tent and it was screaming to be used outside of our living room.
So Memorial Day weekend we moved the tent out of the house and to the Fall Creek campground in Caribou National Forest for a weekend getaway with Tyler. We heard that the possibilities of it raining were high, but nothing was going to keep us from our adventure.


After about an hour drive we pull into our campsite only to see everyone camping in trailers. We laughed at them and congratulated ourselves on being truly hardcore for using a tent until we pulled up to our spot...covered in rock. With no blowup bed or sleeping pads we weren't too stoked to see this but again nothing was gong to keep us from this weekend camping!


We set up the tent,

prepared for the rain,
and then went to explore our surroundings.
After a short hike up to a beautiful waterfall and a picture or two the rain started so we headed back to camp to see if we could cook something before everything got too wet.
The boys gave it a good effort until it really started coming down.  So we headed for safety in the tent to wait out the rain and get warm. When the rain slowed down Ty and Jer went out to hike and explore but I just enjoyed my warm sleeping bag laying on the rocks and reading a good book. We relaxed and surprisingly were able to cook dinner and dessert on our fire. We climbed into the tent to watch a movie and enjoy the night when we realized that we were getting wet in the tent. The blankets that were under us were soaking! The whole tent had water in it. No wonder we were freezing. We tried driving around the "town" nearby to get towels but there really was nothing. We did what we could to fix everything, dry it out and we were eventually able to enjoy "THOR" (except the last 5 minutes...when the laptop died) on the laptop in our "cozy" tent before heading to "sleep". Sleep is something that we did not get a lot of that night. The mixture of wet, freezing, and in pain from all the rocks caused for a rough night. 
So the trip was cut short. Early the next morning we headed home. We considered setting up the tent in the living room that night to finish our camping weekend but I think we were all really over it. 
So the trip didn't end up how we planned but it makes for a good memory!

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Xenotreaching!

For graduation Jeremy got me a pair of sweet hiking boots. They were accompanied by a metaphor about embarking on the next part of our journey in life. Leave it to my husband to be so poetic. And also use it as an excuse to buy himself some new hiking boots too. :)
With these new purchases sitting in our closet, we knew we needed to make good use of them while summer was still here. So we planned a small hike up North Menan Butte...also known as "R Mountain." We invited Tyler on our adventure and boy did we have a blast. 
Our sweet boots

Starting the hike
I'm super excited!

The beautiful view from the top

The 3 Amigos

Probably my favorite picture ever...the boys were trying to get tan (which was obviously needed) and to be the most hardcore they turned their shirts into do-rags. They were the most stylish guys on that Butte!

I'm sure the title "xenotreaching" is probably confusing to most. Let me try to explain. We started making fun of all the words that people have started shortening (like "ridic" for ridiculous.) Then when Tyler and I started to climb this structure thing we were talking about how treacherous this was. This lead to the new shortened word "treach" that we used to describe every scary thing we did. The "xeno" part came from a sign we found that said something about the rocks or bacteria on the rocks...but it used the word xenolith. Obviously we were more focused on how cool the word sounded than what it meant. Somehow after that, the word xenotreach was born. So....
xenotreaching: verb; doing treacherous things on anything related to the word xenolith.

Maybe all the sun or the exercise got to us but either way, we had a blast!