Another spring trip

We took another short trip over the weekend, this time to Lake Powell (one of our favorite places).

Not having access to a houseboat this year, we beach-camped at a long, wide beach nicknamed "tent city" during summer months. It's not very crowded this time of year, since the water is so cold the kids could only stand to be in about this far:

Aaron's brother Jake and sister Emily (and their families) came down from Utah and it was great to be able to spend some time with them (the last time was Christmas). We got to meet Owen, our newest Utah cousin/nephew! He really didn't cry like this the whole time; this is just the only picture I have. I got to hold him quite a bit and he's very sweet and cuddly. Here was our hodge-podge-looking camp. Everything worked out great; it was a little cold on Friday night and Saturday morning so we had a fire and drank hot chocolate.
But by late-morning Saturday it was warm enough for swimsuits and sand castles,
and boat rides and lounging in the sun.

Everything went great until late afternoon Saturday, when things went from great to not-as-great VERY quickly. First of all, it was discovered that the boat has some problems. I won't bore you with the mechanics (which I don't understand anyway), but the bottom line is, it may not be worth fixing (I mean, we might not be willing to spend the money to fix it... I know there's somebody out there who would want to). We're not sure yet, but this beauty just may be going up for sale soon. She's been in Aaron's family since 1987 and has been a GREAT boat!

In the thick of our cooking-yummy-dutch-oven-dinner and our serious boat discussions (repair? sell? pull back to Utah or to AZ after this trip?), the wind decided to pick up. A LOT. This would have been merely a minor inconvenience had it not been for the fact that we were camped on a long, wide, sandy beach. Within five minutes everything inside and outside our tent was covered with sand, and everything light-weight was blowing away. It was forecasted to keep being windy, so the only thing we could do was pack everything up as quickly as we could and high-tail it out of there (we'd planned to spend another night on the beach).

Strangely, the girls came across a big swarm of ladybugs right before we drove off the beach. Here's Zoe with one. I have a picture of Molly with about 10 ladybugs on her arms, but she was giggling and sobbing at the same time and it's not a great picture. Giggling about the ladybugs; sobbing about the possibility of selling the boat. She's such a sweet and sensitive girl.

Oh yeah, and I must mention the dutch oven peach cobbler. It was going to be SO good. The dutch oven apricot chicken was delicious (albeit a little crunchy from the blowing sand) and we let the cobbler keep cooking while we packed up all our stuff. I kept eyeing that dutch oven and thinking, "Mmm, that is going to be SUCH a tasty reward for all this hard work" and "I wonder how much of that I'll be able to eat before it's REALLY time for us to leave this crazy sand storm" and "Will any of these people judge me if I eat three bowls of it?" It wasn't cooking very fast so I added all the apricot chicken coals to the cobbler dutch oven to speed it up. Well as soon as we'd waited as long as possible (everything was loaded into the car and the boat except for a stack of bowls and spoons), we took a look one more time at that peach cobbler and it was still uncooked. It had been at least an hour and and a half by this point! I tried some anyway and it wasn't even hot; barely warm. Warm, gooey, canned peaches with raw cake batter (actually the flavor was very good). As it turns out, hot coals get cold very quickly in strong wind; we're lucky the chicken cooked before the wind began.

The next couple of hours involved a lot of phonecalls, driving around Page, decision-making (or indecision), and finally deciding to spend the night in Page. I called FIFTEEN hotels/motels in the town and they were all booked solid. Weird. So we stayed at the Wahweap hotel (Emily's family and ours quickly reserving two of the LAST three available rooms!) and even though being in a hotel room wasn't our original plan, being able to wash off all that sand in a hot shower that night was pretty nice. Sunday morning, Aaron and Nate worked on Nate's car's brakes, we did some re-packing of the car (everything was full of sand and had been packed very hastily) and hung out in the hotel rooms (adjoining; great luck!) until 11am check-out. We ate lunch at Denny's on our way out of town (where they gave me a Mother's Day carnation) and we got home in time to watch the second half of the Suns game (GO SUNS!) We ended up pulling the boat home, where it awaits an unknown fate. All day today I've been busy laundering everything that was with us on this trip (everything is coated in a layer of fine sand) and vacuuming out the car.

Although not everything turned out as expected, it was still a fun trip. It was great to see some of the "Utah cousins" and I always love going to Lake Powell; yes even despite the sand storm I would probably do it again :)

P.S. There was another random star sighting: Aaron saw Willem Dafoe in the hotel parking lot! Why do I keep missing the famous people? Oh well.

Star sighting update: After Googling "Willem Dafoe Lake Powell" I found that, indeed, Disney Pixar is filming parts of the new movie "John Carter of Mars" (based on a comic book) at Lake Powell this spring. Whaddya know!