*The Rhoades*

Sunday, July 1, 2012

This last week, Preston and I had an awesome opportunity to go as "Pack-In Leaders" for girls camp. We just went from Wednesday to Thursday while the 4th year girls did their own overnight hike/camp. It was a great experience. The girls were awesome. The theme of this year's girl's camp was "Shine Like The Son" we focused a lot on letting the "Light of Christ" shine on them. The spirit was really strong throughout the camp. We did about a 6 mile round trip hike that took us to a cave, we pretty much camped with cow's, Preston and I drove a 14 passenger van so that was fun having it packed with girls, laughing, making jokes, singing their camp songs and some of the time, I was wondering if I was at girls camp or scout camp when they started relieving gas in the back and started talking about who farted more... boy's or girls. Good times. At night, we went to "the rim" that overlooked miles and miles. The stars were so bright and there were so many of them. Preston was in charge of the star gazing part. Each girl had to point out 2 star constellations. It was really cool! Preston and I LOVE hiking, camping, eating camp food, the stars you see when camping.. all of it! Even when there were sighting's of a bear that was near our camp and we had about 7-8 girls sleeping in cars (out of about 20).

The next day we took the girls to the next part of camp where they joined up with all of the other leaders and girls. As we were leaving I was SO tired and SO dirty.. sidenote.. Of all my life of hiking and camping, I don't think I had ever been so dirty. The trail we hiked on, was almost hiking in sand.. so you can imagine how dirty our shoes/feet were. So I was so ready to shower and we were up at 4 the first morning and 6 the second morning, so it made for a long 2 day's. But when we took the girls to the rest of camp and saw how much fun they were going to have, I wanted to stay! But, I was just grateful for the time we got to have with them. We had to other couple's who were leader's with us. It really was great and so many memories were made. I'd do it again and again!

Getting ready to hike!!

an old Prospector's cabin from the late 1800's.

There were butterflies EVERYWHERE. They would land all over us. I felt like I was in a butterfly exhibit.

Getting ready to go into the cave. At first nobody was going to go because there were THOUSANDS of mosquito's in the entrance. Nasty.. But, we got our brave pants on, doused ourselves in bug spray, covered our mouth's, tucked in every part of clothing and went in. It was well worth it.

After the hike.

After a bottle of water and paper towels. Seriously, I can handle getting dirty while camping, but feet caked in dirt was just too much. After a little water on them and clean socks, I was ready to roll!