Family Cabin Trip May 26-29th 2008

This year my family went to the Heber Valley Campground for our annual Family Cabin Trip or Reunion I guess it is now being called. In the past we have always had a BBQ on Memorial Day but this year we decided that after meeting at the American Fork Cemetery we would combine our reunion with Memorial Day. After meeting at the Cemetery we went to a near by pavilion and had lunch (we were running late so we met everyone at the pavilion). We were going to go to a park but because of the cold rainy weather we just went to a pavilion and then let the kids run for awhile before loading them up to head to Heber.

Here is a video of the scenery around our camp.

A little back ground on the HVC. It is where most of the girls go for Girl's Camp, the camp is also available for family reunions and other activities you just have to reserve around Girl's camp. It is staffed by 103 senior missionaries who not only staff such activities as the Challenge courses (there are 4) and Legacy Lake (you can paddle around the lake or use canoes) but they also chop up dead trees to use as the bark around the campsites, cut down the dead trees, collect garbage twice a day, organize service projects (the girls participate in service projects like putting logs around flower bed like areas around trees in the campgrounds, or raking bark or anything else needed.) I know there is a lot more they do I just can't recall all of it right now.

When we arrived at our campsite on Monday, it was snowing and very cold we all made a mad dash to unload all of the vehicles and then set up our beds and get everything situated. After setting up the beds and such we made key chains out of fusible beads. Emily made a green, pink, purple, and white snail she named Gary. Karol (my older sister) and her husband Rich were in charge of the Reunion this year and they had a load of fun activities every night as well as during the day. Monday night was the Disgusting Derby. We were split into two teams. The first activity we did, half of each team put nylon stockings over their faces and the other half had to feed chocolate pudding to those with nylons on their faces. Then we had a burping contest. We stuck sucked on life savers to faces, ran a relay, where we ran to a table and had to do a face plant in various things, strawberry jam, ketchup, cottage cheese, chocolate pudding, and baked beans. We also did a relay where we had to pass cotton balls down the line with Vaseline on our hands. It was a gross but fun night.

Tuesday night was cowboy night we wore cowboy hats, bandannas, and mustaches. We wrangled cows (the kids), rode horses (pool noodles) the kids were chickens and had to peck for food (candy bars) in a pool, we also did a pinata. It was a rip snorting good time.

Wednesday was Star Gazing night. We split up into two teams and then each team chose a CD player. We had 15 minutes to choreograph a dance to the song we chose using glow sticks. My team randomly chose Good Vibrations we had the whole song choreographed. We had three adults and 5 kids. The other team randomly chose Living on a Prayer and they had two kids and four adults. They didn't get their whole song choreographed but the part they did was pretty good. They knew they could win because they used one of the judges sons to do a somersault and then if that didn't work they had my dad use a broom with his glow sticks tied onto it and he used it like an electric guitar. Needless to say they won. It would've been hard for my team to win against an electric guitar.

Thursday we had to clean up our campsite. We vacuumed the carpet in each cabin and then vacuumed off the bunk beds, wiped down the doors, tables and chairs, and then swept off the porches. We also had to clean the bathrooms and showers. Wasn't that hard of a cleaning list we didn't think. We left for home after clean up. All of us thinking that we should make it a tradition of going to the HVC for our family reunion. On the way home Emily said she wanted to go back to our cabin. A sure sign that the reunion was a big success.

Credit for the footage of the campground scenery goes to Duaine. I edited and added music. I also edited a larger movie file containing all of the activities we did. I didn't upload it because I didn't know if it would be of interest or if I would even be able to upload it or if it would be too large to upload.