Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Christmas Vacation meets The Great Outdoors

Jonny and I decided that this has been the best christmas since the "Christmas magic" died.
We've been trying to live it up before we have to head back to school, and it has been a complete success.

The eve of Christmas Eve was full of games with the Flinders... about 5 hours of games. our game of cranium was one not to be forgotten. when we realized it was 11:45 we decided to call it a night.
The next morning I was introduced to the Flinders Family Christmas. First the whole family has to meet upstairs, but be sure not to look in the famly room.. thats where all the presents are... when everyone is upstairs you line up from oldest to youngest and march downstairs while singing "we wish you a merry christmas." then the presents are distributed and everyone is just so excited. we start opening gifts and about 2 hours later every present is opened. - about a week and a half before christmas eve jonny and i had ordered a tent for our gift... with 2 day shipping. the day before christmas eve jonny had said that it still hadn't been delivered. we ask Jolayne if she had seen it and she said that she hadn't. so jonny and i are panicked. we check our order number, and try and track the package, no luck, we still didn't know where our tent could be. I kept worrying that someone had stolen it off the porch and it was lost foreve. On Christmas eve morning jonny runs to the front door to check if it had come, nothing. we said that we would just go to the post office the next week if it didn't come soon. then, when everyone was done opening their presents, Jolayne brings out a huge bag with a big box it in. IT WAS OUR TENT. she just had to surprise us somehow. - Then we had the breakfast - i love Jolayne's waffles and strawberry jam! after breakfast we just had to play another game of cranium.

That night we had dinner with my family. After everyone left Jonny, Jilly and I went to see the lights at Layton park. of course the line of cars was backed up about 1/4 mile, but we had to wait, we had to drive thru that tunnel made of lights! and we did! we went thru the tunnel!

Before we knew it, it was Christmas morning, time to open even more presents.

On December 26th we all wanted to get together before Erin and Ryan went back to Washington. So we decided to go for a hike up Centerville Canyon. After hiking for a bit we decided to find a spot to eat lunch.

Jonny even brought his new jet boil to make us hot chocolate.


After lunch we looked across the canyon and saw the frozen waterfall, and we had to get a closer look.

We could see the water rushing underneath the ice.

After the hike, Jonny and I decided that we wanted to take advantage of the nice weather as much as we could. On tuesday we went for a bike ride on Antelope Island. It was a little cold but it was so fun!

All I wanted to do was see the Buffalo.. "She wants to see the buffalo!"


and we saw the buffalo.

Jonny and I didn't know our way around the Island very well so we were just finding roads and trails that looked interesting and followed them. We went down one dirt road that followed the buffalo corrals. as we were riding down the road we passed a car and this little indian guy in the car looked so excited to see us, he was smiling and waving at us and he was even recording us on his phone as we passed.


as we rode back to the paved road we looked in the bushes and we saw a coyote with a jack rabbit in his mouth walking around. he kept looking at us and was making sure that he was far enough away from us. he made a big circle around us and crossed the road about 50 feet from us.

We rode back to the campsite to make some lunch.

 We used the amazing jet boil again to make us some Mountain House Chicken Teriyaki. but half way thru jonny realized he forgot to pack utinsels so we had to use a calculator cover that we found in his back pack.
it was an awesome ride. we rode our bikes on Antelope Island in the middle of winter, we are awesome people.