Monday, September 24, 2007

The Berryhill / Powell Connection



The last few days have been a blast! After much talk something happened that I never thought would happen. All the male cousins from my Mom's side of the family (Berryhill is her maiden name) got together for a fun weekend on the lake. This was something that has been talked about but you figure it will never really work out where everyone can come due to jobs, families, lack of money etc. It did happen and it was such a good time. We all went to Lake Powell down on the Utah/Arizona border...WHAT AN AWESOME LAKE! The best part of it and the part that absolutely drove the wives and aunts (my Mom has 4 sisters) crazy was it wasn't planned out, we knew where we were going but that's it, we didn't know where we would sleep, eat, or do everyday but just spontaneously winged it every day, it was great. One of my cousins (Scott) brought his boat and we went boating, swimming, cliff jumping, tubing, wake boarding, skiing, and played tons of board games. The first night we all arrived about 1 or 2 in the morning which would usually mean it's time for bed but we didn't go to bed, we instead went and explored the marina, docks, and house boats. When we finally did decide to go to bed we went to the parking lot blew up air mattresses and slept in the boat and truck beds. We slept for like 3 hours woke up and went out on the lake all day. Lake Powell is a canyon lake with miles and miles of channels, bays, coves and canyons to explore, you can find your own "private" lake area any where you go. The second day it ended up raining and being windy but that didn't get us down we ended up going and getting a single person hotel room in Page, AZ all snuck in our air mattresses and covered the floor with them to sleep on, and played games(Liar's dice, Settlers of Catan, Risk, Axis and Allies) all day long...So Fun! We would go somewhere nice to eat every night and just eat snacks during the day. The next day we slept in and then saw it was a nice day and even though we needed to leave for home in 3 hours, we decided to go back out on the boat and get the most out of our time. Then back home we went, which was an adventure in it's self, 4 of us (Scott, Chae, Brandon, and myself) came from Salt Lake (the others from Arizona and New Mexico). Well since Scott's Suburban had broken down a few days before we were to go, he had to borrow a truck to pull the boat, the only problem...it was a single cab pickup. Leaving SLC we all 4 squeezed very tightly into the cab, until we got out of the city. Then we blew up an air mattress put it in the back of the truck put one person back there covered with a sleeping bag and travelled the rest of the way (5 hours) we would take turns riding in the back and sleeping...again it was great! As you can tell we had a lot of fun. Can't wait to do it again in 2 yrs (don't tell the wives but we made a deal we would be doing this every other year)...I'm counting down the days! The view we woke up to the first morning.


RP and Caleb "Let the tube wars begin!" We had a tube war single elimination tournament Chae ended up winning.

Brandon and Wyatt in tube wars

Doing a little exploring

Align Center
Chae has conquered that cliff!



"Check that out!" Cruising the lake looking at the amazing scenery. (see more below)



This is Ace jumping off the 40-50 ft cliff that we all jumped off of. You don't realize how high it is until you jump... as you'll see/hear in the video.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some life-experiences just cannot be planned. I can tell a great deal of "cousin" bonding took place. I would love to take a spontaneous vacation.

Jenny said...

Looks like you had some serious fun. I have an idea. Let's all take Momma K and pop to Lake Powell. Really, it was Maria's idea to have a family reunion there. Then we could get momma k to jump off the rocks! That would be sweet.

Susan said...

The photos are great! Sounds like you had a blast.

Anonymous said...

I would point out that Lake Powell is "brought to you" by the Bureau of Reclamation. Sounds like a fun trip and the pics are great.

Anonymous said...

Travis says he's going next trip, sounds like you had a good time, Chae was dissapointed that you didn't include his puking episode in your blog! I'm glad you all finnally got together and caused LOTS of DRAMA with the Aunts and Moms! I heard ALL about it!