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Monday, June 16, 2008

GUEST POST! - The man of the house...

The brothers camp, which some refer to as  the men to boys camp, took place June 12-14 this year at the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.  Those not able to attend were Bryon, Trent and Russell.  This was the first year that we had a basecamp and didn't back-pack in.  Our camp was conveniently 5 feet from the road and the bathrooms were clean and had superflush toilets.  Dev didn't have to hold it the whole 3 days!!  Car camping allowed us to have better meals with real meat and eggs and pancakes even.  The first night we took a little hike at dusk and saw the sunset  and threw rocks into little holes in the sandstone.  Then we threw big rocks into pools of water 30 feet below.  Then we realized we weren't at all different from hyper Deacons.  Der started it all.

After a cool night, we had a good  breakfast and set out for Chesler Park, in the middle of the needle formations.  It was supposed to be 10 miles round trip.  We missed a fork in the trail and found a off-duty ranger volunteer and swallowed our pride as we looked at her map.  She gave us directions and after lunch we got to our destination.  I had heard of a joint in the rock a little bit further on and spurred the lads on for more adventure.  I found out later none were too happy to be pushed further.  But they did think the joint was cool-- it was about 200 yards of shoulder width slot canyon.  We ate lunch down there in the shade.  Well, after cooling our feet and eating, we set off back to camp.  The heat wasn't too bad, but there was no shade and we were beginning to run out of water.  Der, Devin, and Leon set pretty good paces of more than 3 miles an hour.  When I saw a glimpse of our camp finally, I started running- desperate for a drink of warm water.  All in all, we hiked 16 miles instead of 10 and climbed several Anasazi welded ladders, went over steep passes and scrambled up lots of steep sandstone.  This wasn't no ADA accessible park.  Dad was kind of glad he stayed at camp reading and relaxing.  The next day, we packed up and those that had bikes went on a trail near Moab that had some of the famous slickrock features.  We lucked out with cooler weather, had great food and good camaraderie.  It was all worth the poor sleep, sunburns,  and sore muscles  we got in the process.

And now back to our regular mouthpiece:  That lovely breakfast would satisfy even the most picky taste buds... too bad you can't smell the cranberry/orange muffins that were surprisingly yummy even though they were fat free - yeah, it was a father's day breakfast, but I wanted some too...  It seemed appropriate after the camping weekend that all utensils and dishes should be disposable - continuing the theme through to the packaged condiments which for some reason seem to live in our refrigerator until we finally decide to toss them months later (they were all tossed yesterday).  The one person who was less than pleased with the lovely spread would have been dear M...   
Apparently a special breakfast isn't special without Toaster Strudel - so we had to make two (one for dad - one for her) and deliver it with a happy face... hmmm, someone forgot their happy face.  
We won't admit to the rest of father's day - most of it was taken up by stake conference anyway - and if Q ever tries to tell anyone that I slept through the entire day leaving him to his own devices I'll just point out that I did wake up and compliment him one his wonderfully prepared steak dinner!

Had to throw that in - there's the happy face!  This was our FHE for the day - Rice Krispie sculpturing... Q outdid everyone with his edible shark, and my duck attempt looked decidedly like a decoy...  oh well, they all ended up looking about the same after the eating frenzy began!

The original plan for FHE tonight was fishing - but we figured it was too hot for fish to be swimming near the boiling surface - so we opted for something the didn't require leaving the house (unless you count the quick trip to Albertson's for marshmallows and Crisped Rice Cereal)

5 comments:

cold cocoa said...

Looks very great! Rice Krispie sculptures...very good idea. I'll have to steal that one for next FHE. Maybe we'll make more religious sculptures, like a liahona treat.

TisforTonya said...

that would have been a fun idea... though there's probably some level of sacrilege involved in sculpting the ark of the covenant out of breakfast cereal :) It's actually an idea I remembered from my YW days - when I made a skateboard and my friend made Gumby... though I hope I got more out of YW than that, it's what came up in the good old memory banks this week.

Megz said...

How'd you get Q to type that up? Hub does have a couple pix off of his cell phone but we haven't figured out how to get them OFF his cell phone.
I don't feel so bad now that Q got ripped off on Father's Day too. I had to eleveate my swollen foot and left the cleaning, feeding and childcaring to Hub.
I like that rice krispie treat idea too. It would have to be a very good consistency of treat. Did you water your hands or put butter on them to do the molding? I like mine more crispy than gooey, so I would have to adjust.

TisforTonya said...

We just used spray butter on our hands prior to molding... and yes, it does have to be slightly on the gooey side, but not too much, because then it's too hot to handle... I just used the simple Stick o' butter, Bag o' mallows and 11.5 cups of cereal recipe that I got on allrecipes.com yesterday (I don't make very many of these treats obviously!)

Sherie Christensen said...

It was good to read about the camping adventure from another point of view. I made the mistake of driving my van to the grocery store not long after it arrived home from carrying a bunch of smelly men. It did not smell good! I opened the windows and blasted the air conditioner so I wouldn't pass out. It still stank when I came back out of the store but it does finally smell normal now. I think I'd pick sculpting rice crispy treats over fishing on a hot day too. Way to quickly come up with something fun.