Ava is carefully toasting a coconut covered marshmallow.
Julie, you are the queen.
Delicious!





Mother of 3 beautiful girls, grandmother to 4 active little ones, stepmother to 4 great kids, I think I may have some wisdom to share from experiences in my life!
Ava is carefully toasting a coconut covered marshmallow.
Julie, you are the queen.
Delicious!





So we went to plan B and drove to Warm Springs. It is about 6 miles down a winding dirt road off the paved road that takes us to Mesa Falls. The road was so badly rutted that we decided to park the car and walk to the trail head. This is the view of the Grand Tetons from where we parked the car.
Warm Springs is another source for a river that comes from the huge caldera area of Yellowstone and Island Park. This water comes from the mountainside and is always 50 degrees in temperature.
Just as we crossed the bridge to the trail head I noticed all of these butterfiles on the ground near a little puddle of water. They were so beautiful!
Becca, Julie and Ava have a small herd of elk behind them. These elk never leave this area as there is always food for them, even during the winter.




I always love going to Yellowstone. I even take the same pictures over and over!
Becca, Julie and Me with beautiful Mesa Falls in the background.
On the way back to the cabin, a small herd of horses wandered on the the road as we were driving. We slowed way down and this one walked right up to the car.
On Tuesday, we went to Big Springs where Johnny Sack's cabin is located.
This is a state park and has a beautiful natural spring that bubbles up out of the ground, and the springs create an amazing river that is the start of a tributary to the Snake river.

We saw tons of tracks on the trail, but did not see any of the moose that made them.
The lake was like glass, and the reflection of the mountains, sky, and trees just reiterated the existence of God to me, and that he created everything on the earth for a specific purpose.

The colors were brilliant and we reveled in every scene we enjoyed as we did our hike around the lake. There were also patches of mushrooms and fungus because of the unusual amount of rain.

He injured it enought that he could move it away from the wall. He then succeeded in severing the poor snake's head. It was pretty gross.
I think it was about 5-6 feet long - bigger than any of the snakes we have seen on our hikes! I looked it up on the internet and found a perfect match under "Arizona snakes." It was a Long-nosed snake, non-venomous and common to Maricopa County. For more information here is a link: http://www.reptilesofaz.org/Snakes-Subpages/h-r-lecontei.html The one here is just like the bottom pictured snake on the link, in Maricopa County, which is where we live. I just wonder where this poor creature has been holed up in our neighborhood, and if it has friends!
Nick held open a bag so Rod could throw the corpse in the trash. He does look a little grossed out. We returned to our dinner. Becca stated, "I'm not hungry now." We were all pretty animated after that and had some lively conversation during dinner. Snake taco, anyone??

We used the old "Scooby Doo" sheets for a drop cloth.
On Friday of last week, Becca and I went to IKEA and got her new furniture. They delivered it on Monday, totally adding more stuff to the utter chaos in my house. Monday night Rod and I assembled the bed, and a special storage unit that goes behind the headboard. I don't know if you have ever assembled IKEA furniture, but it is quite an experience. I think there was like a 10-pound bag of screws, bolts, wooden pegs, whirligigs, plastic doo-dads, brackets, and other hardware. It takes a little time just to sort it all out. But if you follow the directions, look at the pictures, and do it just like the instructions indicate, you do get a nice-looking finished product. I did put a couple of different pieces on upside-down, and backwards, making it necessary to backtrack some of the assembly process, but all in all we did pretty good with it. We worked on that until well after 10:00 PM. Needless to say, it was exhausting. I am working four 10-hour days during the summer weeks, so I had already put in a long day. I do enjoy the Friday off, though!
Tuesday night, we got the dresser assembled. That also took several hours. Rod and I made and assembly-line type production out of building the drawers and it worked very nicely. As you can see, Becca supervised.
Part of the finished dresser...

Tina and Georgia sold tickets. (I also sold tickets.) For $1.00 per person, you can get a burger, chips, drink, and cookie. What a great deal!
Many of the teachers enjoyed socializing with their students outside the classroom setting. Ms. Erivez teaches math. She is amazing.
Community members flocked to the multi-purpose room to enjoy all of the carnival activities.
National Junior Honor Society students ran many of the booths, with their advisor, Ms. Peterson. The kids loved this one where they got to throw a bean bag into the Cobra's mouth. The Cobra is our school mascott.

Other staff members were in the kitchen on the serving line making sure everyone received their food. They all worked so hard!
Julie and John McLean.
Our camp cooks made some dutch oven breakfast burritos. They were wonderful! We had beef stew and biscuits the night before with several wonderful choices of cobbler. I do love dutch oven cooking!
Enjoying our breakfast before the work of the day started.
They gave Tammie and Me some blue rubber gloves and told us we were the axel greasers. We greased up the axels before the wheels were put on. It was nice, black grease!
Wanna shake hands?
Our little light weight Suzy-Q stood in the cart to keep it from tipping back while the wheels were being installed.

Tammie thinks she can pull the cart all by herself!
And we are on the road!
We all took turns pulling or pushing in different spots. This gave us a chance to talk to new people and learn about our fellow travelers.