BILLY & CAITLIN: August 2013

On Wednesday, the 17th, we split up in two cars and drove to Utah to the Clear Creek Ranch for our Kleven family reunion. My dad, Caitlin and me drove up in the Suburban and my mom, Kara, Scarlett, and Grayson drove up in the Lincoln. My dad was excited to communicate with the other car using ham radios. My dad, mom and I are all ham radio operators. I know, it's awesome! We stopped in Flagstaff for lunch at a mexican place my parents like. It was pretty good and the kids were being funny.

We're all watching Kara teach Scarlett how to cough into her elbow.

We realized also that Caitlin's running shoes didn't make it in the car and she needed them to run in the mornings and hike. So we stopped at the Flagstaff mall and bought Caitlin some new shoes. We got her Nike Free Runners and they are pretty awesome!

In the meantime, Jenny and Jason were driving to Utah in Jason's grandparent's motor home. It's looks like it was a comfortable ride!

Here's a view of the inside of the motor home with Sierra, Whitney and Carter.

We arrived in the evening, set up the tent for my parents, then went down to the pavilion for dinner. Not much more happened that evening, so we went to bed. Caitlin and I were sleeping in the second story of the stables. Lots of the Barnes family was sleeping there. Here are pictures of the ranch at which we were staying. It was just east of Zion National Park.

Here's the entrance.

Here's the pavilion where we would all eat our meals.

Here's a view from the ranch. It was really beautiful.

Thursday morning, we woke up at 6:00am to be ready to go on a run at 6:30. It was on the schedule that people wanting to run can meet at that time and run together. When we got to the running spot, only my dad's cousin, Dean, and his daughter, Kodi, were there. Kodi is a super fast distance runner and runs on the BYU team, so we were a little intimidated, but glad that she would push us. As we were on our run, my cousin Jamie caught up to us and ran with us. It was a lot of fun to run with everyone. Dean rode his bike and was riding next to me and talking to me the whole time which was awesome because it was fun to talk to him and it distracted me from thinking about how tired I was from running. Not many more people joined the runs the following days, which is surprising to me because there were like 300 people there. Dean's brother Dana and my cousin Neil joined the running group the following days and my cousin Austin and his wife Tess ran with us on Saturday morning. Caitlin and I ran about 4 miles each day, but Kodi, Neil and Dana would run between 8 and 10 miles everyday. Kodi would even run farther too.

Neil and Kodi

Dean and Dana

We don't have any pictures, but on Thursday we went shotgun shooting and were shooting clay pigeons. There was a firing line and 5 people at a time rotated shooting. Caitlin was lined up right before me and blasted her first pigeon out of the sky. She really shattered it! So there was lots of pressure for me to hit mine right after. Luckily I got it! Phew! My sister Jenny was way good and was shooting like a pro! It was a lot of fun and I don't even think Caitlin bruised from the gun, which she was afraid of.

Caitlin and I spent a lot of time playing with the nieces and nephews. Here's a picture of Grayson and Carter standing together. They were born just one day apart.

There was also a little dirt road that went through the ranch and I was driving Jenny and her kids back to the lodge near where their motor home was parked. Jenny told me that Carter like to drive, so we put him up on my lap so he could grab the steering wheel and he loved it.

Friday was fun because we did breakfast as usual at the pavilion and later went on a hike. Here are some pictures from breakfast.

Kari Stock's son Slade was keeping the grasshopper population under control. Here he is catching them in a juice bottle.

He kept them in there over night and I asked him the next day if any were still alive and he said, "A little bit of them" and had a funny smile on his face.

Slade's little sister Maylee is showing them to her grandma at breakfast. My aunt Jayne is pretty awesome and just laughed at it.

Then after breakfast we got ready and went to Zion National Park and did a hike called the Weeping Rock. It was a short hike to a rock overhang that was dripping lots of water. Scarlett was funny because she would walk like 3 steps then stop walking, or start walking really slow and there were tons of people around so we were causing traffic jams. She didn't want anyone to carry her, but then she wanted to ride in the kid carrier thing, so we strapped it on my back and put her in. She was having lots of fun.

From left to right: Grayson, Kara, Scarlett, me, Caitlin, Jason, Whitney, Sierra, Jenny, Carter, Mom and Dad. This is at the Weeping Rock.

Me and Scarlett

After this hike we went back to the trail head and ate lunch. There was a grasshopper that landed on my shoe and started walking up my leg, so I let it go on my hand and the nieces were trying to build up courage to touch it. None of them did, but they came really close to touching it!

After lunch, we took the shuttle to the Narrows and just played in the water near the entrance to the hike. Here comes a lot of pictures...

After we finished this river time we headed back to the shuttle to go back to the cars to drive back to the ranch. Scarlett was way tired so we put her back in the backpack thing and she really liked being in there. We even left her in it on the shuttle.

She did fall asleep in there before we got off the shuttle and she stayed asleep the entire walk to the car from the shuttle.

Looks comfortable right?

Saturday was fun. It was the day we all wore our Kleven Family Reunion shirts and did activities. There was a tug of war, which Caitlin and I didn't see because we went shooting with Jenny and Jason and the girls, Tyler and Gus. We also played on a slip and slide which was really funny because Scarlett loved going down it so she would just lie on her belly and Caitlin would push her down the side of it. Jason also threw, like really threw, Whitney down the slide which was really funny to see the look on her face. During the slip and slide, a huge storm blew in all of the sudden and was blowing away people's awnings. We all ran under the pavilion and I was holding Scarlett because she was cold and wet. She was so funny because she was holding a ball, a toy frog, and a tootsie pop aka her "stuffs". She was having a lot of fun. Afterwards, it looked like I had peed my pants because Scarlett was so wet from the slip and slide and the rain. Here are a bunch of pictures.