Bear Lake

A few days after Ammon got home, we went on our first official family trip. I hesitate to call it a family reunion because somehow that makes me feel old and in my head you must have at least 50 people present to have a family reunion and heavens there was only 14 of us. But anyway, bright and early (9:00 am...that's early for me!) we left for Bear Lake, Utah. There were 3 cars and we all had radios and then the kids had there own radios. We had WAY too much fun on those radios. More about the radios later. We got to Bear Lake and set up camp in our two camping spots, had lunch and headed over to the beach. The water was not too cold and the beachy fishy bird poopy smell not too bad. We all swam and then we played some soccer and football. This is Autumn with the ball and Randy chasing her while David, Aaron (he's losing his trunks) and Ammon watch. I can play football. Hello, I've attended two BYU football Womens Clinics. However, I was not prepared for Aaron. He could care less your gender. He's only goal is to plow you to the ground. Avoid him at all costs.

Here's another football picture: Amy, Randy, Aaron, David and Ammon. I'll admit that Randy, Amy and Aaron schooled us.

Here's Jacob playing on the beach

Here's Mom and Dad and then Adam playing on the beach

Driving back from the beach our Mexican genes came through with us shoving 11 people into the Expedition and that's with Matthew in his carseat. Nothing like a little combi ride to remember Mexico by. We ate hamburgers and yummy raspberry shakes for dinner and that night we stayed up and played Phase 10 by lantern light and learned that Randy is a cheater. And we already knew that mom gets a little crazy late at night but hey that's what makes it FUN! The next morning we got up and had hot showers (YES!) and drove up the road to Minnetonka caves. (If you're counting people in the picture below...yes Aaron is missing. He decided to take a nap in the car, the stinker!)

The caves have 444 stairs going in and 444 of the same stairs coming back out. And according to Randy more than 100 of those are the stairs that rip your face off if you fall. By the end of this post you're going to figure out that my brother-in-law Randy was the trip comedian. He kept us laughing the whole time. Remember those radios I was talking about early...yeah Randy had his own stand up comedy show on them. It was so fun!

Here we are inside the cave, which personally I thought was awesome. I have been to this cave twice before when I was much younger. The best is at the end of the cave they turn off the lights. Matthew even fell asleep for awhile strapped to David. That's my cute sister Amy next to David who looked fabulous the whole trip while I looked like....oh like I was camping. (The cave photos are Randy's...thanks!)