TREK!!!

Trek was a blast! We were called to participate as a "ma and pa".

We were pretty excited and kind of nervous, but it turned out great. We had 8 kids and a "grandma and grandpa".

They were originally supposed to be our big brother and sister, but they were double our age. It was great to have them along because they helped us out so much!On Wednesday, we were the first to arrive of the ma's and pa's. We helped the first and second wards get ready.

After almost everyone was checked in, we went into the cultural hall to watch a video to help us get into the "trek" spirit. We had

some great people that helped organize this trek.

Mike called the man in the picture "Brother Trail-Boss". We weren't assigned to our families until we got there. We were really excited to meet everyone. I've always been really bad with names, so I made an extra effort to get everyone's names memorized. By the end of the week,

I was able to name off each member of our family.

When we arrived, it was a nice partially cloudy day. It wasn't too

hot or too cold during the day. The trail was somewhat easy for the first 2.5 miles. We ate lunch and then got started on the tough part. There was this huge hill that we had to pull the handcarts up. According to the missionaries there, they said that we were one of the fastest groups to pull up that hill. Just about all of the members of our family are very athletic, which probably explains why we made it up so quickly.

From left to right: Bryson, Jarren, Josh, Brett, Ali, Hailey, and Shandie and Alex .

We pulled another 5 miles that day after lunch. We were pretty excited to get to camp. That night, we made 5-can soup. It was pretty good. The stake food committee did a great job with organizing the meals. This 5-can soup had 1 can of vegetable soup, 1 can of green beans, 2 cans of corn and 1 can of Chili + some ground beef.

For breakfast the next day we had Pancakes and

Sausage. After we finished breakfast we got everything back up and started walking again.

On the second day we were scheduled to walk 4.5 miles. It was all flat terrain, however it turned out to be 6.2 miles. There was supposedly an error with the GPS-We didn't find out about the actual mileage until we had set up camp. By this

time, I had about 4 blisters, one of which was ENORMOUS!

You can't see it very well in the picture, but if you check out my foot, you can still see where it was!

Later that day, we all got together to play "Pioneer Games". We mainly competed against one other family and our kids DOMINATED all of the games, including Tug-A-War!

We had a way good dinner that night. We were planning to have chocolate fondue for dessert that night, but we ended up not eating it until breakfast the next morning! It was really tough to get out of the dutch oven, but we managed.

The next day, we pulled back to the place we had lunch on the first day. We set up camp and ate delicious hamburgers! I could barely walk that day because my feet were so sore! Even Mike was feeling down. Something that kept us walking was the random singing that Adam, one of our "Kids" was doing. Always a different song. =)

On the last day, we were all anxious to go home. I had the option to ride along in one of the many vehicles they came with, but I decided to walk instead. It was only 2.5 miles, but I regretted it the whole way until I came over the hill. Then I was really excited that I made it. We kept singing "This is the place." I wish we had video of it because it was pretty funny! Some kid said "Isn't that from a movie or something?" and we laughed about it.

Overall it was a great trip. I forgot how hard it is to walk that far. I seriously thought I wasn't going to make it. It's funny because I'm ready to do it again even though it hurt and I was tired and dirty! It's a good way to remember our pioneers and all of the things they went through and gain an appreciation for everything they did.