It's an adventure!

It seems like you guys are getting the lame-o version of my summer. Sorry about that. I've done so much stuff it's hard to cram it in. (And, as my family can tell you, I don't like to shorten my stories. The long versions are so much more fun!) So, here's my attempt to describe the adventures we had last weekend.

Last Friday, we set off for Gallup, NM--again. This time, it was for the bi-annual Smith Smith Smith Family Family Family Reunion Reunion Reunion! (I love that you can change the font sizes on this thing.) Yeah, we're pretty exciting. Our reunion consisted of: eating, doing crafts (one for the kids and one for the adults--I did both :) ), shooting, eating, skits, and eating. I don't know why, but it's not an official Smith gathering unless there's LOTS of food and not nearly enough time to eat it all. Or enough stomach-capacity, for that matter. We had fun just visiting with each other, though. The older girls (16-25--the single ones, of course) slept together in one of the rooms in the cabin/lodge we stayed at. I love my cousins. They're pretty much awesome. The first night we all wanted to play Uno, so the 6 of us scrunched up on the top bunks of 2 bunk beds (not a very level playing surface) to play until about 1:00 a.m. Fun times.

Just so you all know, I took a total of...6 pictures of the reunion. And all of them were taken on the way home. Apparently I was too lazy to get the camera out. Or I just forgot.





So, the way home was a special adventure. We were driving along, it was raining off and on, and there was fog everywhere, which was cool. Then, traffic suddenly stopped. But, since it was such a nice day (for us desert-dwellers), we didn't really mind.

(Don't Seth's feet look nice and cool?)

But, after nearly 20 minutes of not moving, we started getting...anxious, I guess you could say. And really curious as to why we weren't moving. After a few more minutes, some lady drove by yelling "The road's washed out!" to everyone, thereby solving the mystery. Great. So, we flipped a U and decided to go down the control road to get to Payson rather than going the long way around. (Or so I was told--I really don't know where anything is up there.) Another lady rolled down her window and asked us where we were going, so we told her. Apparently we looked like we knew what we were doing, because she followed us into the forest even though we told her it would probably be a bad road. (Did you notice that awesome foreshadowing there?)

We all trundled along for a while (Seth with his phone/GPS going) and then went left at a fork in the road, passing a sign saying "Primitive road". Yeah, that was really reassuring. But, we didn't really want to go the other direction (it was longer), so we decided to risk it.

To sum up: the road was slick and muddy, the lady had 2 kids in her week-old car with her and was therefore understandably freaked out, and she was caught in the middle of our Carpenter/Croft caravan (my sister and brother-in-law and their kids were following us in their car). So, we were pretty much stuck with the consequences of her inexperienced driving. Namely, her getting stuck in the mud on the side of the road and having to find some way to pull her out. (I'm not saying that I would have done any better, of course--I probably would have been about 50 times worse). Thank goodness there were lots of trucks behind us with chains and towing capabilities. There were a few casualties, though. Sarah's flip-flops:

(Don't be deceived, she's crying on the inside.)

lots of napkins (thanks Uncle John!), and the cleanliness of our towels and car upholstery. But, none of us got stuck (and the lady was safely bundled up between large trucks after her rescue), so it wasn't too bad. We decided to say it was an adventure because, let's face it, it totally was. And it rained almost the whole way home from Payson. Free car wash, baby!

As you can probably guess (and the Guthries know), this is the extremely condensed version of the story. But, it still proves that any outing can be an adventure with a car full of Carpenters. Even going from Heber to Payson. :)

Dr. Carpenstein out.