She Came Back Alive & Well

I didn't need to fret. Danika had a great time, and came home extremely dirty, but pleasantly upbeat. It was a great experience for her. One teeny part of me regrets not going, but I'll get over it :)
I think she missed Trixie the most!
Nothing like feeling the sand between your toes . . . for 4 days! I have never smelled such stinky socks. Ugh!

Trek Diaries

Danika is scheduled to go on our Stake Trek August 5th. We have one skirt & bonnet already, but we have to get another skirt, a shirt, and some bloomers made in the next week or two. This has got me thinking about when I went as a much younger person--the same age as Danika to be exact. Weird, huh? Well, I dug out my old slides--yes, slides--and had them converted to digital. It was really funny to look back on that adventure. Every summer we would come to Utah for the whole summer, so I did this with the Hyrum Stake. I really didn't know anyone at all, except I lucked out and our Bishop's wife was in my family.

Our "Family" (that's a lot of kids). Our Ma and Pa are on the left.

The terrain--somewhere near the Strawberry Reservoir, I think. We went back up into those hills. Notice those clouds? Yep, we got rained on. A lot. Even some hail.

The first day we pushed the carts into the night, and slept right on the ground under a light drizzle. It's all part of the experience, right? The next morning (pictured below), after a lovely bowl of cornmeal mush, we pushed on to base camp.

At base camp there was an old corral where we did all the group activities--including Sacrament meeting. They passed around pie tins with the bread, and communal tin cups for the water (yes, we all took a sip from the same cup--yuck). There I am, second from the left--a vision of loveliness, don't you think?

Our meals were pretty authentic. Cornmeal mush and oatmeal for breakfast (sprinkled with ash from the fire). Lunches were usually beans and ashcake--flour and water mixed until pasty and then made into a pancake and placed on the coals to cook. Just dust off the ash and squirt on some honey. Not too bad when your starving. Dinners were stews and such. So by our last full day we were all pretty hungry. That's when they brought in the turkeys. LIVE turkeys. They put them in the corral, and each family got to catch two. The kicker is that if you wanted to eat them, you had to kill them, pluck them, and prepare them to bake in a pit. Yeah. Talk about Lord of the Flies. But, it left an impression. And those turkeys did taste really good!

Chasing those gobblers

Cooking those gobblers

What's a pioneer activity without the quintessential stick pull?

I don't remember this girl's name, but the way she looks pretty much sums up how we all felt by the last day.

With all of the rain, we had a lot of mud and streams to wade through on our way back. I had mud up to my bloomers, which you can't really see, but I remember.

All in all, it was a sort of miserable experience, but I'm glad I went. And it gave me a new appreciation for the Pioneers.