Memorial Day Weekend

We have been going camping on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends for a few years now.  It has become a nice tradition for our family and makes us go camping at least twice a year.  We go with a group of families from our ward and we really enjoy the time spent with them.  This year, we headed to Arizona down by Sedona.  I believe it was called the Pine Flat campground.  We arrived on Saturday and checked into our campsite.  We were right by the bathroom which was good and bad.  The bathroom consisted of an outhouse toilet in a nice enclosed room.  There was no odor when you were in the bathroom, but if the wind blew right, we had an odor at our campsite.  We set up and Tanner approved of the layout in the tent.

We had a beautiful view of the mountains surrounding our campground.

Our site was next to the Shafer's and Tanner had several visits from his friend Madeline.

Taz always has a S'more and always makes it look so delicious!!

The boys had no trouble sleeping in in the mornings.  The first night there, we were all freezing at bedtime.  Garry and I never warmed up, but Taz said he slept warm. 

We are sure enjoying our new camp chef grill we got.  Garry has no trouble whipping up a delicious meal in no time. 

We decided to go on a hike Sunday morning.  We went down the road about 10 miles and headed out.  It was seriously about 15 degrees warmer down there than our campsite.  Alexis and Taz and Heather were the three that stayed back at the campsite and didn't go on our hike with us. 

We did Allen's Bend hike and Tanner was a help to his little friend again. 

At the end of the hike in, we had a great view of the river below us. 

It was pretty and quite warm. 

The campsite were sticklers about what we could and couldn't burn.  Taz went against the camp rules and burned this stick he found.  Luckily, no one caught him and we made it work. 

In the afternoon, we convinced Taz and Alexis that is was warmer down the road and that they should go cliff jumping.  The agreed and we all went. You had to cross the river to get to the cliffs.

It was a pretty little area with differing heights of cliffs and a small pool to jump into. 

Robbie and Heather were the adults that went with the kids, the rest of us were spectators photographing and videoing the jumpers. 

Some people needed a little help navigating the cliff climb.

Here are Taz and Alexis on the highest cliff debating whether or not the water is deep enough to jump into.  Robbie went first and didn't have a problem, so they decided to go for it. 

Tas was a little leary about it hurting his ear since he really hurt it bridge jumping last summer, but he said it was ok.

We made all the jumper's do a grand finale jump at the end.  Our vision was for them all to jump at once, but they lined up and ended up going one at a time.  Poor Seth (Between Alexis and Heather just peeking through) was freezing and didn't want to go again, but he was a sport and did it for the sake of the picture.  (L-R: Taz, Alexis, Seth, Heather, Tyler, Robbie, Camryn and Audrey)

We rode back to the campground in the back of Dave's truck so the jumpers could be in the warm truck since they were still cold. 

We were back to our freezing campground and enjoyed time visiting around the Hill's campfire. 

Taz and Alexis really wanted an adult fire and a kids fire.  They determined that if you were old enough to legally drive you could be at the adult fire.  So everytime a kid said something that annoyed them they were shout 'kid's fire!" It became the standing joke of the day.

We were glad we brought hot chocolate.  We were sad we forgot a pot to boil the water in.  Luckily, the Hills let us borrow one and we warmed up in the evening. 

We had a last night around the campfire talking and telling blonde jokes and scary stories (I told them about Talon's haunted prison night) and roasting marshmellows. 

Our last night there it rained all night after we went to bed.  We had to pack up wet stuff and bring it home and reset it up to dry out!

But inspite of the rain, we had a last morning delicious breakfast.

We headed into Sedona.  Trey had told me about the Javalina Cafe which apparently housed a squadron of Javalina's.  So we decide to go find some.  The mall that it was in was very pretty with nice sculptures and windmills and little ponds and waterfalls to look at.  So we went all through it on our search for javalina's. 

Nice statue, but no javalina's.

Beautiful flowers and sculpture, but no javalina's.

We loved the windmills, but no javalina's.

Tanner mimicked the cool sculpture, but no javalina's.

Finally I settled for a picture with the sculptured javalina because there were no real ones to be found!

Sedona was beautiful and we would have toured a little more if we hadn't been unshowered for the past two days.  We headed home calling the weekend a success.  Least you think I favored pictures of my son...Cynjyn did not go with us because she opted to attend the band trip to Disneyland for the weekend.  She had a great time there.