On Friday night our ward had a camping trip up in Payson Canyon. As we traveled to the camp site, Doug and I noticed that there was a fire on the side of the mountain. We wondered whether or not we would be able to get up to the camp out at all, but although there were firetrucks on the road, they let us pass by. Come to find out later that they had just opened the road back up and many of our ward members had been denied access to the canyon earlier that day. We got to the camp and set up our tiny tent. We fit two kids, an air mattress, two adults and all of our stuff into this tent (picture below. The picture here is from our back yard since we didn't take any at the actual camp ground).
The reason for the air mattress was because I told Doug the last time (and only other time) we went camping that I wouldn't go again unless we had an air mattress. It just is way too uncomfortable. I guess I'm just not the "roughing it" type of person. And yet even with this mentality I decided that we should bring our two little kids with us. Sometimes I wonder at my sanity or judgement skills. Anyway, everything was going fine and we were having fun, and then it was time for bed. For those of you who don't know I am 5'10" and our tent was 5' 8 1/2" long, so my toes were crunched, which made it hard for me to go to sleep. Evelynn did go to sleep with out too much of a fuss which was a miracle in itself, and then Doug was out maybe 10 minutes after her. Eloise sleeps anywhere, so she was the first one asleep without a hitch. So I'm lying in bed trying to find a place for my feet when I hear someone walk by and ask if anyone is awake. Even though I was awake I sure wasn't going to respond to him because I didn't want to wake up my girls. So I figured if I stayed quite and really still he would eventually go away, and he did. About 10 minutes later someone else came by and started stopping by tents to tell us we had to evacuate because of the fire. By this time it was 11:45 and the girls had been asleep for a half hour, but we crawled out and got the scoop. Apparently the strong winds had kicked up the fire quite a bit and the park rangers were telling everyone to pack up and leave the canyon. Another miracle happened when we managed to get our kids into the car without them waking up, and then pack up our tent in 20 minutes flat in the dark. How's that for efficient! Then we helped everyone else in the ward get packed up to leave and took off about 12:50. We followed a guy in our ward who knew the canyon pretty well and ended up cutting 45 minutes off of our drive time home by going down this winding dirt service road that spit us out in Santaquin. All I had to say about that ride was that I was sure glad Doug was driving cause I was freaking out. I have poor night vision, so add that to pitch black night, windy roads, low visibility due to trees and lots of dust from the road and I was just glad my hand didn't cramp from grabbing onto my chair. Needless to say we made it out fine, and got home around 1:30. After putting the girls to bed and showering, we got to bed about 2:00 and then we were up about 6:00 am because that's when the girls got up. It was a long night. We found out later that everyone that had to go the long way around on the Nebo Loop to Nephi got home around 2:30 or 3:00am because the Payson way out was closed due to the fire. So we got lucky that way. But I guess I can count our first family camping trip as a success because a majority of the family was actually asleep, in a tent, out in the mountains. Maybe I'll get to sleep next time.
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