Well, I was wanting to explore nature while away from the Arizona heat, so my wonderful brother, Ryan, organized a "remote" camping trip for all of us. It turns out the my idea of "remote" and his are two very different things :) Anyway, the two pictures you see above are before the...um...storm hit. Sonja and I "drove" the truck up the mountain literally over huge boulders with Anelise, Jonah and Dawson in the back. It was taking awhile (with us having to go 2 miles/hour and bouncing around all over inside the truck) and we slowly watched the storm clouds moving in. Apparently, the weatherman's prediction of only a 20% chance of showers was more like 110% chance! By the time we got near the top (still never actually saw the top campground, but from Ryan's description it sounded lovely!), all "hail" was breaking loose with torrential rain, thunder, lightning, winds, and huge pothole puddles to drive through. All the kids were soaked, the gear was soaked, the food was soaked, and nothing had been set up yet. Oh and, by the way, it felt like 10 deg. up there too! Needless to say, Rye called it quits and we started to head back down the mountain.
After a few minutes, Sonja and I had headaches the size of the mountain we were descending from all the bouncing around so we switched Rye places and got into the Rhino (mini-jeep). This is when the "fun" really started. After riding through one of the before-mentioned lakes...I mean, puddles, the Rhino got water in something important because it stopped working. So, Rye decided to tow us down the mountain with a long, metal line. Besides getting whip-lash a few times, everything was going well from this point on....that is, until the line broke suddenly and whipped back at Sonja and I as we ducked for cover from the large, heavy metal clasp! Unfortunately, Sonja's hand didn't make it out unscathed and she showed quite a bit of swelling within a few minutes. So, Rye ended up just tying the thing to the truck as we were nearly to our cars at this point.
Meg, Zeb and Linda (Sonja's mom) had been waiting for us in their cars in the dark for a while now. We were supposed to have rendezvous'd with them much earlier in the evening. Although Meg was ready to set up camp right there, the rest of us had had enough adventure for one night and we all ended up meeting at a local Wendy's for dinner (we still hadn't eaten anything!) in our wet clothes at around 11:30pm. Dinner was palatable (until they ran out of chili) and we all ended up crashing at Rye & Sonja's that night (on couches, beds, whatever)....to be cont'd.
