Thursday night, we went to the Laketown Rodeo with some friends. (Random sidenote shout-out, Tavis is one of the coolest little kids I've ever met.) And I've gotta say, as much fun as it is watching the cowboys go "Yeeehaw!!" after the jump from a successful bullride, the kids events are by far the most entertaning part of the night. The first kid event, open to any kid up to 6 years old, is the calf chase.
The object of this event is for the kids, after they've been lined up straight by the rodeo clown (a line which, let's face it, could never trully be contained by one man in facepaint and suspenders) and after the music begins, is to grab the orange ribbon, tied to the end of the calf's tail, which is released on the other side of the arena.
This year, once the Hamster Dance began to blare over the loudspeakers, and the mob of kids dispersed in a blast, everyone thought they were in for just a few minutes of cute hilarity.
They were wrong.
The calf seemed cornered, and kids in pink glitter shirts and overalls and cowboy hats finally converged upon it, the winner sure to emerge... until the calf appeared on the edge of the crowd, a string of children chasing behind it. It had somehow managed to fight it's was through the throng of children while keeping the ribbon securely on it's tail! This happened five or so times, until at last one persistant boy snagged the orange strip. It was amazingly hilarious to watch.
I believe the 7-10 year olds took a grand total of thirty seconds to catch their calf in comparison.
The next day we went boating. Which was awesome; I got way sunburnt, everybody had fun tooling around in the boat (besides Jake, who wasn't there yet) and... yeah, that's really all for Friday.
Saturday, Mom and Dad came back down to SLC for Dad's school reunion. Jake, Tj (cousin), and Aaron (their school friend) came up, and we slept all day till afternoon, at which point we braved the Rasberry Day crowds for a pizza. They went off and played tennis with Max while Amanda and I drove around in the Mustang and did our best to avoid hitting a wandering skunk while in a convertible. THAT could've turned out messy!
Sunday, we all got up and went to church, seeing several families we knew from the home ward. Nothing unusual!
The next day we went boating again. We loaned our wave riders to some friends from the ward, and as we were in the boat we saw two figures on a wave rider, stranded in the middle of the lake. Dad's immediate thought was that one of ours had quit on our friends, which was very possible, because one of the two does have a few personality kinks. As we got closer, we could tell it wasn't ours, however the two riders were frantically and happily waving us down, so we came over and offered help. The two girls were very grateful for it, adding that they had been towing a wakeboarder in the water who had swam back to shore for help. As we started towing them back, one of the girls said a quick snippet of something french to the other. Dad chimed in (he served his mission in France) and soon a conversation was on the way. As I've only taken a little French, I wasn't able to catch much, but I did catch she was from France. A big boat came our direction, obviously the rescue team for their stranded friends, and one still soaking wet guy jumped off the back and swam our way. He was the newly wed husband of the French girl and had served in the same mission and Dad. It also turned out that the she's in medicine, and Dad had a presentation he needed translated with french medical terminology for a church humanitarian trip to Morocco. Anybody else seeing the Lord's hand, or is it just me?... Also on Monday, the boys went back down to SLC to take Aaron home, and so that Jake could attend his SBO meeting.
Moving along, Tuesday we had planned to be a day off the lake and around the town. We toured the local Paris tabernacle, visited the Oregon/California Trail museum, looked around an antique store, and went bowling. We waited for Jake and Tj before heading out. Jake had an interesting ride home, got his first speeding ticket!
At the Tabernacle, Amanda found a little kitten that followed her around and that she desperately wanted to adopt, as ran after her to the car even after I had carried it back to the flower bed behind a monument.
No, we have no cat still. At the museum, we each picked out an item and had a contest to see who could present it as the coolest object there to everyone else. Such an old ploy... I don't know how it worked so well! I found a lot of awesome things at the antique store, including the very first A-track I've ever seen, and an old Hulk lunch box worth $50! Bowling was also a ton of fun, everyone enjoyed it!
Our cousins (the Robertites we've dubbed them, since it's confusing to always ask which Drapers we mean) came on Tuesday, but we didn't do much with them till Wednesday, when we went boating. Now, don't get me wrong, I love boating. But boating is really hard to blog about. So, aside from the part where we were terrified for a while that a truck of fisherman was a Ranger called over to scout us out for anything that might deserve a ticket (we might have been a tiny bit closer to each other and/or the shoreline than 150 feet... occasionally), there's not much I can really say. Lucky you, valiant reader, who has already made it this far in my huge post.
So... this post has been deleted on me twice already, and this is as much as I was able to save. So, I'm gonna end with saying that on our last full day, we visited an awesome glacier lake and Jake and Tj jumped into it from a cliff in the freezing rain. The hike up there and back was gorgeous! Overall: awesome vacation!
Ps. We also went into a cave. Pretty sweet cave.
