Labor Day Adventure

Posted on September 8, 2015

Since it’s Labor Day, and Jan had no radiation appointments, we thought it’d be fun to spend time together as a family among the pines and aspens. We set up camp amid the trees, close to a wide open meadow.

  

We placed chairs around, and Mycah built an enclosure for a fire pit.

  

  

Bernadine gave the kids the challenge to build a fire without matches.  It was interesting to see the ideas the creatures came up with…

Jonathan tried rubbing a piece of wood in the groove of a log, and made lots of smoke but no flame.

My nephew, Caleb, tried his luck with flint and steel, and had no luck either.

Jude asked me if I had a flashlight, which I did, and she removed the batteries and formed a strip of foil from a gum wrapper into an arch, touching the negative and positive ends. Since it was just a AAA battery, it didn’t work.  She tried with a 9Volt battery and came close but didn’t have luck. Just for the record, I showed this approach to the creatures a while back, and it worked with  AA battery.

The creatures also tried with a lens from a pair of glasses – holding it at an angle to the sun so that it could ignite dry grass beneath it, but for some reason that didn’t work either. Caleb finally grabbed the matches and lit the fire!!

We places a kettle on a log, filled with water and mint we had picked in the meadow, and places corn neatly in the fire to roast.

  

We also roasted hot dogs on sticks that we had sharpened and all enjoyed a delicious meal together. The mint tea was incredibly good.

   

And of course, one cannot have a camp fire without making s’mores. Jude always takes great pride in roasting marshmellows to perfection!

It felt so good to walk barefoot through the woods and the meadow.

   

The creatures showed me a shelter they had built.  It was quite impressive. We want to go back and sleep in it!

It was such a beautiful day, chatting and laughing together, and spending time doing what we do best…Loving each other.

  

 

     

We had to make sure the fire was out completely to prevent forest fires, and the boys helped us with that!

  

On the way home, the scenery was beautiful. The Grand Tetons were the perfect backdrop to the hundreds of acres of freshly harvested fields, leaving them looking like a giant patchwork quilt.

When we arrived at my sisters house before starting the final leg of the trip to Firth, I noticed Sandhill Cranes in a nearby field.

The were so graceful and appeared to be dancing in the setting sun. I could still see the Tetons from there and had to take just one more photo.

As we drove down the road, a flock of geese flew overhead, calling to each other as they worked their way South.

I am so grateful to have experienced this beautiful day of life. The mountains, trees, meadows and fresh open air, are an incredible gift to experience, and it is right here for us to enjoy. I am a blessed woman.