Powell Power!

Once upon a time, my cute friend Cali said: "Hey, I want to go on a road trip this weekend. Do you want to come?"

And I said: Maybe, where are you going?"

And she said: "I don't know. Lets figure it out."

And the rest is history. And by history, I mean we sat down for a substantial amount of time every day for the next week in preparation for our journey. And oh what a journey it was.

Cali, myself, and 5 boys + 1 girl decided to go to Lake Powell for Memorial Day Weekend, 2010. With 8 people and two very determined drivers we made a pretty impressive loop around the great state of Utah in 3 days. Check out our route:

We departed Provo around 4:45 pm on friday and drove ourselves alllll the way down to lake powell. We camped on the beach. It was already dark by the time we got there, and we were cranky and sandy and windblown by the time we went to bed.

But then, we woke up to this:

And the angels were singing. We had a glorious day filled with sun and sand and water and wonder. And happiness.

Then, the boys tried to cliff jump off of a rock that jutted out about 20 feet at the bottom from where they were standing, and I literally had to talk them down from the edge. I used my best mom voice to try to convince them that if they jumped, their final resting place would be in the Lake Powell chapter of Davy Jones' Locker. It was exhausting. They surrendered after a 10 minute showdown and jumped off a smaller cliff instead.

I also brought a plethora of sunscreen to share, and encouraged everyone to re-apply to avoid ultra-violet radiation burnage. I'm such a vacation asset. Oh did you want to see another random picture of the beauty that is Lake Powell? Okay:

We had a jolly good time camping on the beach again that night. It looked like this:

The next morning, we woke up with the sun to drive to Mesa Verde. We stopped at four corners, which was closed for construction (which isn't even geographically placed correctly) and I bought a turquoise necklace from a nice Navajo lady. A couple hours later, we stopped for sacrament meeting in Cortez, Colorado. We made a quick change into church clothes in the bathroom and continued on the the chapel where we listened to an old lady talk about diabetes and illicit drug use, followed by a Guatemalan man who didn't know English. He spoke for a half hour. It was just great.

Finally, we traveled on to Mesa Verde and played (respectfully) in the crazy ancient native american villages.

It was there that I felt most at home, running and climbing and crawling around some bomb.com cliff dwellings. I felt one with Pocahontas once again.

To Be Continued.