Young Womens' Overnight Trip

On Wednesday, June 23rd, just a couple of days after Josh's head injury, David took a couple of days off work to hold down the fort while Alison and I went on an overnight trip with the Young Women.  We had such a great time!  Let me show you a bunch of pictures:

Here's Alison getting set up in the YW bunkhouse.  

Here's four of the five leaders in our bunkhouse.  L-R, Melanie,Lisa, Myself and Meka.

This is us before we went white water rafting.

And here we are after, along with our guides and the rafts.  We had a BLAST!  No one got hurt, or even angry!  The girls were all in love with the guides (which was crazy, they were a grizzly, smelly bunch if you ask me).  The trip was long and fun, with a good mix of peaceful floating and thrilling rapids.  And afterwards, we all had a chance to jump in the river and float downstream a bit.  Brrr!  But awesome!

Once we came back to camp, we started up a fire and cooked tinfoil dinners.

This is one of my cute Mia Maids, Olivia.  She really helped with the cooking!

We all wrote uplifting notes to each other for the campfire activity later that evening.

There's Beth, who was in charge of the whole thing, and Meka.  All five of us leaders are very good friends.  It was so fun that way.

After dinner, we went for a hike.  We kind of got lost looking for the trail head.  But we didn't let that stop us from having a great time. 

That;s our bishop.  His granddaughter is one of Alison's best friends from school.  

The hike was really great.  It was funny to me how many of our girls suddenly became sick as the hike time approached. However, we were able to coax them all into joining us and I think (thanks to some smart planning, fun activities and frequent stops) we all had fun! 

Mother and daughter on the hike.

We were up late cooking s'mores and having a nice devotional.  Everyone went to bed at a pretty reasonable hour.  Of course, I didn't actually fall asleep...EVER...but I think almost everyone else did.

After breakfast the next morning, we went zip lining.  This is Ali and her friend, Blakely.  

Ali and Blakely are talking to Melanie - my neighbor, friend, and the YW president.  She's pretty fantastic.  

A couple of my wonderfully silly Mia Maids, Ellie and Jade.

Alison was pretty vocal about being nervous.  

The leaders.  There's just no way to get a flattering picture when you're all harnessed and helmeted up.

Here's one of the five or six lines we zipped across.  I HATED every second of this activity.  I didn't know until I was about half way up the ladder on that very first line that I am VERY scared of heights.  I'm not going to throw around a word like "phobia" but it was pretty close.  I could not get my feet to move to take the leap.  They were frozen.  The best I could do was kind of melt off the edge of the platform.  It was pathetic.  I never ever want to zip line again.

In spite of all of her anxiety beforehand, Alison loved it.  

We drove to Cove Fort on the way home.  The girls were pretty sleepy and converted several picnic tables into impromptu sleeping cots.  Alison is second from the left.

Cove Fort.  I'm second from the left (the huge one) and Alison is the last one on the right. We stopped at an ice cream shop in Santequin on the way home.  We were back shortly after 5:00 pm.  What a fun, busy, exciting trip!