Since moving to a new area of Utah in January, we haven’t done nearly as much exploring as we initially planned. (Poor weather/the first trimester of pregnancy + lots of puking are valid excuses for this though, no?!) Since I'm finally feeling much more like my usual-self and Stephen had the day off work, for Memorial Day we decided to head to the mountains for an adventure! Well, we mostly just set out for a fun afternoon in the mountains, but we maaaay have gotten a little more than we were looking for ;)
Our plans were pretty simple: Meet our friends Bryce and Melissa at Silver Lake, build a campfire, and visit while roasting hotdogs, cooking *the world's best* tinfoil dinners, and indulging in s'mores. The perfect plan!
Perfect, perhaps, but not particularly adventurous...
Not long after loading up the car to embark on this afternoon in the mountains, it started raining. Mother nature loves to give you those little surprises! (In her defense, when Stephen checked the weather forecast earlier in the day, he accidentally checked the forecast for "silver lake" in exactly the opposite direction of where we were headed, hahaha, so the rain shouldn't have actually been a surprise at all...)
We weren't sure how this rain would affect our plans, but since our friends had gone up the canyon earlier in the day and didn't have cell reception, we decided to just head in their direction and make the most of it (all the while hoping the rain would dissipate). After getting lost multiple times, off-roading in the rain, and getting our car caked with mud, we found our friends, who had, unfortunately, gotten a flat tire! 😂🙈
Bryce, Melissa and Landon jumped into our car and after a bit of driving around we found the perfect spot to set up "camp" and start our fire (thankfully by the time we made it to this point the rain had stopped). After unloading the car and an intense search for kindling (which proved difficult due to the recent downpour) Stephen and Bryce successfully got our fire going!…just in time for a ranger to come inform us that -- despite the fact that the fire-pit we were using had been there long before us -- no fires were allowed in that part of the park. 🤦🏻♀️
15 minutes later the fire was doused, four adults + three children and a heckuva-lotta stuff were re-loaded into the car, and we resumed our search for a prime spot to *legally* start a fire. A spot was found and we again unloaded all the people and supplies. Starting a second fire (after using most of the trash we had in our car as kindling for the first one) proved to be even more difficult. An excruciating 20 minutes later we were in business with a campfire! (Did I mention that Stephen and I had spent all afternoon working on our masterpieces of tin-foil dinners and in all the excitement forgotten to eat lunch?!)
As you may have imagined, the whole getting-lost-dealing-with-a-flat-tire-moving-camps-and-lack-of-kindling situation set us back...a bit. At this point, as soon as there was a flame, we scarfed down the hotdogs, made some s'mores and then started packing everything up to go home 😂 (after Stephen took the drone out for a quick spin).
With three curious children under the age of three, a free-flowing river just a few feet in one direction and open flames a few feet in the other, "visiting around the campfire" was, unfortunately, forgotten, along with the tin-foil dinners that we were certain would be unlike any the world had ever before seen (in the best way, of course ;)).
Despite the craziness and things not exactly going to plan, we had a ton of fun and are surprisingly more motivated to do the whole thing again now that we have all the kinks worked out! haha
_ _ _
han.
PS We ended up cooking our tinfoil dinners in our oven the next day and...they basically tasted like meatloaf?! hahaha Neither of us have ever made meatloaf before but turns out if you throw all of the "most delicious" things in your fridge into some hamburger that's basically what it is. Who knew!
PPS Although we didn't do much in the way of "Memorial Day" on Monday, later that week I took Lydia and Elliott on a walk to the nearby cemetery where we looked at all of the decorated headstones and talked about veterans and our country's flag. I realized how important that is to do after listening to this podcast episode and I hope to incorporate more education into patriotic holidays in the future!
^^We were pretty proud of our finished work. We knew it was going to look different after being in the kiln, but when we went to pick it up a week later, it was QUITE different than we were expecting (read: ugly hahahaha).
