Rowley Campout and Summer Adventures!

WHEW!!!!

I had to take a break from blogging! Plus, I don't know WHAT happened to the formatting on that last post. Blogger, you are a weird beast. The pics never insert where they are supposed to, they always end up at the top. And I want to make the post wider -- it's all squished at the moment. And trick out my page, but first things first... I'm still just in June and a lot happened in July...

Well I'm NOT trying to insult your intelligence, but if you see a picture that you like, if you click on it, it will open in another page to original size. You can right-click and save, and then upload to Walmart or the like and print professional, goodlookin' photos to pick up or have mailed to your house. It's what I do. My printer doesn't do the best job with my pics, so I outsource.

So without further ado: More of Danelle and Adam's summer adventures!!!

Here we are driving to the Rowley Reunion Campout - The Heat is On! (And that song was stuck in my head a lot of the time...)



I took a lot of pics of the scenery on the way up. I guess I was feeling inspired. Don't worry, not everything is a picture of a tree. Pretty quaking aspen and scenic views, though.

Adam gives my picture-taking the thumbs up!!! Okay, maybe not really...









And we have arrived!





We brought our telescope and had a lot of fun looking at nebulae, clusters, and Jupiter and Saturn. We also attempted to take long exposure pictures. I like the way the stark trees look against the black sky. In reality, the sky was so lit up with stars, and the Milky Way was sooo bright and beautiful. Perfect timing to go camping, with the new moon and the planets up and a favorable tilting of the rings of Saturn. And all the moons of Jupiter were out! Io has a really fast rotation period so sometimes if you can't see it, just wait an hour or two and then you will see it. ;-)

Anyway, big tangent... back to campout pictures. We had fun talking and playing games.



This picture makes me laugh really hard, and not just because of Adam's jocular face. :-)



We went and hiked Twisted Forest and it was amazing. I had never been there before. The hiking went slowly because we were so high up. Usually I like to go fast, but we were always running out of breath and needed frequent breaks. That was odd. But the scenery was beautiful. I had to take more breaks to take pictures. :) It was nice to sit in the dirt at the top though, and try to catch my breath. (I didn't care if the tiny ants at the high elevation were climbing on me.)





Me and my baby





Lovely wildflowers poking out of a rock.













Finally made it to the top!



















Throwing rocks off the cliff!!!









Back at camp, lots of cute kids!









Beautiful Sego Lilies - the Utah State Flower.



Messy kids playing in the dirt! I'm cracking up!



The kids (and some adults) played with water pistols and the marshmellow shooter. Some did a taunting dance to the people shooting marshmellows on the hill.



Glenn had a good time hitting his brother Mark with the marshmellow shooter.



The marshmellows were making it around 40 ft, and some would land on top of the blue tarps and roll off. It sure got the adults' attention underneath. We had fun watching people shoot marshmellows. :)









Nathan taunting the marshmellow shooters while holding his water guns.





Later on we built a fire and asked some of the boys to get firewood. Well they found A LOT of firewood!







The kids started to play teeter totter on all the logs they had found and piled up.





Gwendolyn makes some GREAT scary faces! Oooooh!



Making a monkey face!



Happy Fourth of July! (And the parade around camp was really fun.)





I have this fun LED wand that you wave to make messages and pictures appear and I thought it would be fun to play with at camp. I could wave my green LED flag proudly. It just looks faintly green in this exposure but Adam took a better picture of me waving it at night. I got this device from Thinkgeek.com, one of my favorite nerdy websites. I'm not sure if they still offer this LED wand, but there are a lot of other good items.







Adam got a pretty good exposure of the night sky. You can see Saturn (it's the bright one) and a few other stars. We really enjoyed bringing the telescope up, even if it did take up most of the car.



Hope you enjoyed the campout photos! Still got more to post...

Meramec Caverns - Hide-out of Jesse James

While we were visiting the inlaws in Missouri, Adam, Anne, Nathan, and I went and checked out the awesome Meramec Caverns. Truly an amazing place! We had a great time and our tour guide was pretty funny. Here are some pics from our adventure. At the Cave Entrance! Haha, Nathan's cracking up because he's giving Adam bunny ears. Unfortunately they are hard to see with this camera angle. The first cave room is HUGE! It's ballroom size, it gets booked for parties, it can fit a lot of chairs and there's even a discoball. In this picture, Nathan is boogie-ing under the discoball in the dark ballroom. Adam and Nathan posing in a room full of stalactites and stalagmites, ... and "soda straws." Just gorgeous and immense! Illuminating the caves in different lightning makes them look so mysterious-o. Going up the big stairs to the Wine Room. Excerpt from wikipedia about the Wine Room in the Meramec Caves: "The fifth level of Meramec Caverns includes a "Wine Room." The Wine Room is home to the world's rarest cave formation, The Wine Table. The onyx table stands six feet high and is supported on three natural legs. Known as an aragonite formation, this structure was composed almost entirely underwater. The Wine Room and the Wine Table are adorned with grape-like clusters called botryoids. Originally called the Wine Room because of these grape clusters, the cave now claims that it is called that because of the "whining" that visitors do when they learn that the room is accessible only after climbing numerous stairs." There are only three of these "tables" in the known world and this is the largest one. It doesn't appear to be able to support its own weight anymore. Either that or someone broke it. Check out those large "bunches" of "grapes"! Playing around in the slippery caves. Now onto the Stage Curtain room, complete with stadium seating. We're going to see a light show and listen to Kate Smith sing God Bless America.