Our Trip to Moab

My parents have a fun tradition of taking our family to Moab every year, so we left Collin with my fabulous mother-in-law, and decided to make it a fun trip for Jayden. When we arrived we decided to set up camp. As you can see from the top picture, the tent looks fairly normal, but isn't even close. Jeff and I started putting poles in slots. We began with 2 long poles and 5 short. We placed the long ones in what we thought were the correct spots (crossing over the biggest part of the tent, and connecting at the bottom), but as soon as we connected them, one corner would come loose. To make matters worse, We had 5 spots left for poles (that none of them crossed each others path to connect), and 5 poles. For those of you who have put tents together, we were in need of expert assistance! We tried everything from one of us standing in the tent to see if we could see more slots for poles to laying it down flat and starting over. After a short time we said "forget this, we will deal with this later". My brother and dad came back from a bike ride, and we enlisted the help of my brother (who just graduated as a mechanical engineer), and knew we had found our expert advise. After admiring the job we had done so far, the knowledge came that we were missing the top piece (that would connect all of our poles that were pointing to the sky together)! FYI--Jeff gathered the tent--So as you can see in the next picture, they found a plastic bowl in our car, and decided to duct tape (works for anything right?) our tent poles inside. There were six of us around, 4 holding poles up, one holding the bowl down, and Jeff duct taping the poles inside the bowl. Jeff, in his duct taping madness, had the sticky side up, so the first few rap-a-rounds didn't stick, (and we were all laughing too hard to tell him), managed to make it stay up. I'll let you finish laughing for just a second, yes there is more! So we figured we could stack bags in the corner to hold the tent up, and Jeff climbed inside to blow up the air matress. He came out and notified me that he had seen 2 air mattresses in the attic, but just "picked one," and it turned out to be a twin size mattress (that us 3 were supposed to sleep on), and that the pump didn't even fit it, even if we wanted to try and make it work! FYI--Jeff gathered the mattress--After all of this, we decided to just rent a cabin from the same campground. What have I learned in all of this you ask? I from now on, will do the packing, ALL OF IT!

Later on that day, we went hiking up by Slickrock bike riding trails. We had so much fun just being together as a family, and enjoying each others company!