Alene & Daren,
Here is a little travelog of what we did while we were having the time of our lives in Flagstaff! Thanks again!
Justin caught his first horned toad within about 5 min of being there…
Rachel immediately found some projects to keep her busy… First she sewed up a few seat cushions that came unattached from the ties, then she decided to restore a bunch of wood furniture:
She enlisted a bunch of help…
We don’t dare add up the hours, but let’s just say it was a labor of love…
Curt did a few little repairs. He fixed a towel rack that was coming off the wall. He fixed a leaky shower head. He tore out some old shower caulking and re-caulked it. We re-attached a tile in the kitchen that was a “baseboard” next to the garage door. Dusted all the fans and blinds. Then he fixed a few things in the shower area (door stop and hook):
Then he cleaned up the courtyard and washed all the windows and screens:
Jaren mowed in 2 different sessions, but he finally got the grass tamed:
Justin didn’t JUST chase animals. He helped on pine needle duty. He said… “Dad! I know why you like foot rubs after working hard now!”
The kids learned a few new games:
Yes… every single one of our kids now knows how to play chess:
… even our 5 year old.
While I worked at my “workstation”:
The rest of the crew went to Bearizona and had a blast with all the sights there:
We sort of had a “Bearizona experience” of our own when Justin found a “physics defying” Gopher Snake under a railroad tie in the front yard:
… Seriously it was about 5 feet long and it was aggressively hissing like a rattle snake when we were taking the pictures. We don’t know where it went, but hopefully not in the septic tank…
Poor bunny… it really did get caught in the drain of the garage driveway:
And this horse decided to sneak out onto the highway. Some people chased it onto your property where we chased it like the Swiss Family Robinsons until Rachel was finally able to catch it and get it into the corral:
It was a wild mustang (that someone owns but never trained)… there’s a whole story we’ll have to tell you about the neighbor’s dog, calling the sheriff, and loading the horse into a trailer while it made it’s final attempt to get Curt… it’ll be fun to tell you sometime 🙂
There were other animals too. Justin was happy to help with pest control:
He also found some pretty lizards:
Baden found a dog costume and couldn’t help himself.
Curt hiked to the top of Humphrey’s Peak with the boy scouts. The air was really thin:
There was a forest fire burning far off… but there was no danger… just very eerie. It made a pretty sunset:
No horses were ridden, but Baden wanted you to see how serious he was about riding when he is big enough.
When we went to church, the Young Women invited Makayla to their youth conference. They went to the Flagstaff Extreme course and she had a blast. She made new friends and learned to be brave. She was so grateful to have participated. The people there were really kind.
We did some dutch oven cooking:
Daren introduced us to disc golf. The kids are totally addicted!
Hiking in June? Yep! You just need 2 walking sticks.
We had the time of our life and thank you so much for letting us spend so much time there. We hope that it was at least a fraction as helpful to you as it was memorable for us!