Returned with Honor

The Zach attack is back! Congratulations to our nephew on his safe arrival home from his successful mission in San Bernadino, CA. We will miss the blessings we received from his service but are extremely happy to have him home with us again. He followed the family trend and decided his first matter of business was to purchase a motorcycle.
Bryce

The Farm

Each August we head to the farm for our annual Jessen family reunion. It started off pretty normal with everyone gathering for lunch. Each time our families get together we always sort of gravitate towards our own families so my grandma had a great idea of numbering each table, and we would all draw out a number from the hat and thats were you sat. So we were all drawing numbers and Bryce and I both drew table 6!! So we went through the line to get our food and the clearing opened up to our table and lone behold Tori drew 6 too!!! It was kinda funny because it was only a table of 4 so it was Bryce and I, Tori and my uncle Randy. Anyways we thought it was funny!!!!

So after lunch we all posed for the annual farm picture that Bryce finally made it into! Yeah Bryce!!! Then we had a baby shower for Carlie and the babies, my aunt Susan and cousin Katy put it all together, we played the game where you unscramble words that have to do with baby stuff. I wasn't very good at it but what made it funny is my mom copied off my page and wrote one of the answers with the wrong scrambled word!!!!!! She is so funny! We had a good laugh!!And we had the best cake....it was so good!

Then for the most entertaining part of the afternoon my grandpa put together a monsterous waterslide for all the crazy guys in our family, and the little kids too!! Katie posted it on You Tube and I checked it today. Its been watched about 600 times!!!! But here is one that I recorded. My camera died so I didnt get the one with all the guys going down but it is the best one I have.

After the watersliding we went on a, what was supposed to be a scenic bike ride through Fairview Canyon. Well, it was definitely scenic but it didn't turn out at all how we thought it would. So before we headed out we stopped at Tori and Jeffs, we lathered on the sunscreen because it was scorching hot, and headed on our way.

As soon as we got into the canyon it started to get a little cold, the farther we went the colder it got. But for some odd reason we just kept going. I was hoping that it would get warmer so I opted to keep truckin on. So as we kept on driving Jeff was leading and he could tell it was raining just ahead of us so we drove kinda slow. But we eventually ran right into it and decided to find shelter. We found our shelter in a camp ground bathroom, not in the bathroom, under the porch thing. (Note the picture below) We stayed there for about 20 minutes and Jeffs all famous words of "It looks like its going to blow over" didnt give us any comfort because it never did blow over!!! The rain stopped for a second and we asked some campers from a nearby camp site how much longer until we would be out of the canyon. Fifteen minutes was their answer, so we jumped on the bikes and braved the cold wind and rain.

As we were coming into the little town on Huntington I think we all felt a little hope that things were starting to turn brighter for us. Passing a gas station and a little grocery store, we stopped at both looking for any kind of sweater or jacket (I forgot to mention that Bryce and Jeff only had a t-shirt on , and I just had a thin zip up, Tori was the only smart one to have brought her leather jacket) So we tried to find anything that we could buy to keep us warm for our long ride back. NO LUCK THOUGH!!! No one had anything. We stopped at a gas station, got some hot chocolate, sat down and all we could do was laugh about how dumb we were, and how we got our selves into this mess. Our cell phones wouldn't work and all I wanted to do was call my mom (I felt like a little kid again) I asked the clerk if I could use their phone and she asked if it was local and I said yeah Mt. Pleasant and she said sorry, thats long distance. I felt so helpless!!! I should mention that because we kept going and didnt want to go back home through the rain, our only choice was to drive through spanish fork canyon in the dark with road construction and semis!!!

I was finally able to send a text to Carlie to let them know we were alright and I would call them when we had service. So we found out there was a Walmart in Price, which was supposed to be 10 min away. Well it wasnt, it ended up being an extra 40 minutes round trip, but it was a must!! We bought sweaters and jackets and we geared up for our hour and a half drive back home. It was seriously so scary driving through Spanish Fork Canyon in the pitch black. We passed about 5 different sets of deer (thank goodness for Jeffs loud harley, he led the whole way home and each time he saw deer near the road he would rev up his engine and they would run away) and Bryce being the skilled driver he is, was able to smoothly swerve around a cardboard box in the middle of the road as we neared the end. But we did eventually make it home, and it felt so good to be back at the farm.