Arizona to Idaho

The summer has begun. The sun finally decided to come out and stay!

It seems that as we grow up summer vacation isn't so much a vacation anymore. We don't get to ride bikes with our friends all day, or run through the sprinklers and eat otter pops, or end the night with good 'ol fashioned game of kick the can. We get to be grown ups.  Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my life, but without the few little trips we get to take each year I don't know if I could make it.

Last week marked the first trip to Lake Powell! This is the first year my family has gone together and I can't even tell you how excited I was to go.  I love Lake Powell SO much! Needless to say, it was definitely an adventure. Here's a few things that happened:

--The first night we were there, a cooler full of soda was stolen out of my sister's boat... (The boat was parked in the hotel parking lot).  The next night another cooler was stolen out of another boat, and the people reported it so the Page, AZ police came and checked it out. They figure it was someone looking for alocohol. I'm guessing they were pretty bummed out when all they got from us was a cooler full of shasta.  They eventually got a person into custody... it was a woman in her mid 40's.

-- The first night a few of us went and saw Transformers 3.  Page has 1 theater and 1 screen... needless to say we were the only white poeple in the entire room. As far as the movie goes, I was pleasently surprised.  I'm always a little worried when they make 3rd or 4th parts of  a movie but I gotta say it was pretty good.

-- Day one on the boats: We were all freakishly excited to finally be on the water, we loaded all of our stuff, got launched and as soon as we got the boats in the water, the wind kicked up. Long story short, finding our beach was not a fun experience. Big waves splashing us in the face, boats pounding the water and a cold wind to add to the mix. Not fun. This was my dad's and a few other's first time down there, they weren't impressed by this experience at all. The wind finally died down and the rest of the day turned out to be pretty great.

My nephew Brock (who is 6) was such a stud on the wakeboard, he popped right up and showed us all how it's done

Jolene also conquered the wakeboard.. after many summers of attempting to get up SHE DID IT! Way to go Jo!

Speaking of Jolene she got engaged right before the trip.. (the third wedding in 2 years for my parents and the second in this year alone... whew.) BIG congrats to Jolene and Matt.

-- The rest of the time was amazing. Except one thing. We got a ticket.
The next day we launched at Wahweep and as we were jetting off to our destination... we were stopped by a little ranger guy on a waverunner.  He stopped us because I was sitting on the back of the boat, apparently you can't do that but I didn't know, so I apologized and got down into the boat.  That wasn't enough for him, he needed to check the boat to see if everything was under safety regulations. All was well except for one thing; we didn't have a type 4 throwable flotation device. Now if your asking what the heck that is... so were we.  So for that, we were ticketed.  Come to find out, the type 4 throwable is essentially a floating square with handles... I guess the 10 life jackes on the boat just weren't enough floatation devices? That little floating square cost us $131.00 in tickets. Awesome.  To add to the mix Riley was the one who got the ticket. Why? Well he was driving at the time and even though it wasn't our boat.. we got the ticket. Just our luck of course. Oh well.
Don't worry we didn't let that ruin our day at all. We still spent the rest of our time cliff jumping, wakeboarding and getting beaten up on the tubes.  All in all it was a great trip!

We got back from Lake Powell at around 12:30 1-ish Saturday night, and Sunday morning we got to drive up to Bear Lake for Riley's family reunion. You guessed it, we were pretty tired and sick of being in the car. The weather wasn't the greatest so we didn't even get in the water but it was worth it for the raspberry shake and good company. I was too busy napping in the trailer to take any pictures but it was nice and relaxing :-)