St. George: Saturday

 

Next up: Volcano.  The description was pretty exciting: “Hike among ‘lava clinkers’ as you corkscrew 500 feet to the top of an extinct volcano where you can view a volcanic crater and panoramic scenery.”  Sounds epic right?  Turns out, it kind of was, but not for the same reasons.  I didn’t get a picture of the mountain as seen from the car, but it was covered in snow. 

Now, we had seen other places “covered” in snow, but it was only on the north side of everything.  Why we didn’t apply that to this mountain, I’m not sure.  But I wasn’t leading, so we’ll blame the fact that we walked strait up the mountain while it was covered in snow on Jeff and Krista.

Josh D. found a trail near the bottom, but Jeff and Krista followed some other footsteps that went strait up, so that’s the path we took.  It was hard because none of us had shoes that did anything advantageous in the snow.  It was a pretty slippery climb.

  

   But we made it!  Here’s a view of the crater.  And a view of how there was only snow on the north side of things.

Pictures from the top.  Jeff and Josh couldn’t rest until they had sacrificed something into the volcano.  They wanted me to make it look really epic, but they were standing so far away from a gently slopping decline that it just looks okay. Haha.

Hey look!  We found the trail!  Turns out, there really was a “corkscrew trail” that went around the volcano and was not covered in snow!

Krista’s camera has a cool panoramic setting so I tried to run consistently with it.

 
 
But the real panoramic view really was worth the hike!

As we were going down the trail to the car, there was a branch in the trail.  I followed Jeff and Krista again, and was wrong, again.  Here are Noelle, Kaitlan, and Josh D. on the real trail, while our shoes were caked in mud and we trampled through sticky bushes and other such undesirable things.

After the volcano, we went to wait for the other group at the sand dunes.
 

They were pretty quick, so we weren’t there for very long, but we were there long enough for Jeff to perform a quick photoshoot for me and Kaitlan.

 

And then Jeff did some flips.

We went out to eat at a diner and then had a BONFIRE!  Most of the other group was going to camp that night.  My flash wasn’t working or I would have taken a picture of the two teensy tents that they were staying in.  One for the one boy who was camping, and one for the seven other girls.  They were crazy.

And that was the end of Day 1!  Next up: Church, Temple, Dinner, and Games Night!

St. George!

Friday night we drove down to St. George with some friends.  Our new friend, Josh D. (we really do call him Josh D.- this isn’t some sort of privacy thing) drove us down in his mini van.  Kaitlan, our other new friends Elise and Krista, and I drove down with Josh D. and Kate and Jeff drove down in Kate’s car.  There were two groups that were going down, and Josh D. was kind of the link between the two.  However, Krista and Elise ended up being in Jeff’s ward (along with almost the entire other group) last year and Kaitlan’s ward the year before, so there were tons of connections between the two groups. 

We ate a quick dinner at another girl’s grandparent’s house and dropped off Elise and Krista

and then headed to Kate’s grandparents.  Remember them?

 

I love them so much, and that was probably the thing I was most excited to go to St. George for, knowing that I would see those two sweet grandparents again.

Saturday morning we went garage saleing with Kate’s family.  We only did it for an hour or so, but we had a great time.  Especially Kaitlan, can you tell?  :)

Next stop was Pioneer Park!  This is one of the great places in St. George because it’s just a bunch of big rocks that you can climb on.  Our destination was Fat Man’s crack, which was actually rather disappointing.  We were expecting a huge crack in the earth, but instead is just two rock smashed together.  We had a good time climbing up through Fat Man’s Crack, especially the boys. 

Fat Man’s crack.

  

Jeff had a very important phone call.  This one is for you Jamie!

 

Because there isn’t actually that much to do in Pioneer Park and it was super crowded, we went to Snow Canyon to do some real hikes.  Last year when we went to St. George and were trying to find a camping spot (the time we drove around for 4 hours trying to find a spot and then ended up in the same spot we were when we first got to St. George) we stopped at Snow Canyon, but the lady said that it was at least 10 degrees colder there than the rest of St. George and we said absolutely not.  However, there are some beautiful hiking and rock climbing spots there. 

First we stopped at these lava tubes.  They were pretty cool, and a lot deeper than it looks in the dark picture.  It was pitch black down there, and kind of scary because no one could see anything but we all knew we were travelling down. By the time we took the group picture and sat there for a couple minutes, it was insane how much better we could see.  In fact, it was so much better, that half the people thought that it really had gotten brighter outside.  I guess we’ll never know…

  The coolest part of the day probably was this rock formation.  I loved the changes between that orange color and the more tan color.  This was also the warmest part of the day, so we all had a great time just basking in the warmth.

 

This was also the point of my favorite picture from the entire weekend. 

Jeff was nice enough to take pictures for me so that I could have proof that I was on the trip.  :)

Because every group vacation needs a group jumping picture.

This post has been long enough.  Next up: Volcano, Sand Dunes, and Bonfires!

My Conversion Story

A little more than a year ago, I converted to country music.  It was one of the best decisions of my life, but it didn’t come easy.  I grew up hating country music.  When Jamie and my mom started to like country music, I mocked and despised them.  No, it wasn’t that bad, but I would definitely complain when they were playing any of that “crap” in the car. 

After awhile, I formulated the opinion I would keep for the next many years, the idea that country music “had the right idea, but terrible execution.” 

And I was satisfied with that opinion.  But one day I went to Idaho with some people in my ward, and the driver Cody asked if we liked country music.  I used that line on him, and he told me that he had been the same way but that one day I would come home from a long days work, sitting on my front porch, feeling gross wearing a two day old shirt, eating corn and watching the chickens run around the yard and at that moment, the only thing I would want to do would be to listen to country music.  Not even classical would do.  He told me that it probably wouldn’t happen until after I was married.

It sounds ridiculous, but when he was describing it, I was fairly convinced that although I didn’t currently like country music, I would be okay with a conversion sometime in my future.  (This was pre-liking Cody, bytheway.  I still felt fairly uncomfortable around him at this point, so this view was more unbiased than you would think).

My roommate Kate liked country music too, and had her own country conversion a few years earlier, so I was being exposed to it a bunch.  I started to soften a bunch toward the music, but then one day, February 1, 2011, Kate played me a song, My Front Porch Looking In, and my true country conversion suddenly began. 

My first Pandora country station, created February 1, 2011.

Since that day, it was still a slow conversion for it to completely take over my life, but by the summer, I was totally converted and didn’t listen to almost anything else.  I am more balanced now, but I don’t listen to anything in my car besides country music and it’s definitely the most played Pandora station I have.

People will always be country haters, but it is really is the best.  No one can really convince you to like it.  You just have to find that one song that’s going to convert you!

Happy One Year Anniversary!

My Friday

“You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, just literally 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you something great will come of it.” -Benjamin Mee

It was so awkward to date you

Ah Singles Ward Talent Shows.  Don’t you miss them? 

Kate and Kaitlan’s ward’s talent show was last week.  For a long time, we’ve been planning on writing a parody to Taylor Swift’s “Enchanted,” changing the main line from “It was enchanting to meet you” to “It was so awkward to date you.” 

We thought it was a brilliant plan.  Everyone loves a good joke about Provo dating.  Problem was that whenever we tried to write it, we

just sounded like snobs, and that was definitely not what we wanted.

So weeks went by and we never got very far on it. Finally we just pounded it out in a matter of an hour or so. Maybe not the best lyrics ever, but hopefully not as snobby as it potentially could have sounded.

Kate and Kaitlan really wanted wigs, so they bought us some sweet Taylor Swift wigs. Unfortunately I never got a picture of us with the wigs.

Not that it would have mattered, because everything but 5 pictures got erased off my memory card from that night, something I’m really disappointed in. So we don’t have a video from us performing it on stage, which really stinks. The only video I got was us practicing in front of Jeff and his roommates. Not a great video, but at least you can see 2 of our wigs and you can actually hear us a lot better than you could in the real video. Enjoy!