3 for the price of 3!!!

A week and a half ago we went to our Family reunion. I had collected some ideas to blog about, but until now I have not had the chance to write them. So HOT DOODOO, SON OF A SEAHORSE! IT'S AN ALL OUT BLOGFEST! YEEHAW!!! Everyone pull up a chair and get your favorite blanky. Old man Sterling is going to tell you how it was in the good ol days!

First off we drove to Idaho Falls to go through the open house of the new Idaho Falls temple. That was really cool. The mural in the creation room was incredible! After we went through the tour we went and had cookies and lemon water at the adjoining stake center. As we were leaving some people walked up to the car on each side with arm fulls of pamphlets and DVDs. The lady on the driver's side approached me and said "Would you like a pamphlet and video about the temple?" I said "Sure!" As she passed it through the window to me she smiled at the kids in the back of the car and said "These are FREEEEE!!!!" The smile slowly melted off my face. I looked over and the gentleman on the passenger side was passing Mandy a different pamphlet and DVD. Something seemed awfully fishy all of a sudden. I pulled out of the parking lot slowly as I looked at the pamphlet and DVD. When the church gives pamphlets to people I never hear them say "It's FREEEEE!!!!!" The pamphlet and DVDs had similar graphics and layout that you might expect to see on church materials. But on the back, centered on the bottom there was not a church logo but one for some organization. They had obviously gone through a lot of trouble to look legitimate. I never did watch the DVDs or read the pamphlet to see what sort of jabs they were taking. I had a hard time believing an organization would put any money into distributing "FREEEE!!!", informative and unbiased information about temples. We wondered if they could even legally stand on church property and hand out these things. There was so much security running around there, I doubt they where allowed to stay very much longer than just after we saw them.

We continued on past Hailey and Sun Valley and into Stanley Idaho. We were meeting everyone at the Triangle C cabins and from there were going to go eat in Stanley. I pulled into the Triangle C cabins which consisted of a long horseshoe shaped gravel road. Small one bedroom log cabins were on the Left and outside perimeter of the loop and a grass common area with a lone picnic table on the inside. I scanned the cabins for a familiar car of one of the family. All of the cabins were vacant and there were no cars anywhere. Off on the other side of the loop there sat a small house that was obviously the manager's house. I saw someone standing on the porch and he was flailing his arm up and down like it might have been on fire and he was trying to extinguish the flame. Amused and bewildered I drove closer. As I got closer I could see he was looking right at me. What kind of strange greeting was this? The closer I got the more frantic his movements became. As I got even closer I could see his face in the shadows of the porch. He looked kind of angry, more than he was happy. Now he had his hand in front of him, flat moving it up and down like he was pushing a floating table under water. I still had no clue what he was so angrified over. I didn't want to proceed fearing that whatever I was doing, by proceeding I was upsetting him more. But fearing that this might be some strange way of telling me he needed to talk to me and if I didn't oblige he would call the sheriff on me. Knowing this was a small town I was afraid, he might have been the sheriff too... and the judge... and the jailer. so I proceeded slowly. As I got even closer I could see he was yelling at me too. I still didn't know what to make of the situation and I proceeded yet closer and rolled down my window so that I might further interpret his wild gestures and his red faced bleating. When my window was down he yelled at us "SLOW DOWN!!!! We have children running around here!!!" I looked back at the empty and ghost town-like cabins I had just driven by. A lone tumble weed merrily bounced end over end through the grass. Beyond that nothing seemed living. I thought "Well... I wouldn't have driven so fast if I didn't think you were waving me over to you!" I didn't say it... but I thought it. For some reason anytime I say anything that begins with me jabbing an index finger into their chest and saying "Listen here dumba$$...!" Is always interpreted by the recipient as "I would like you to punch me... as hard as you can!" So, I just said "OK!" and rolled my eyes as I slowly drove away. Now Angry myself I drove away. Now Mandy was mad because she was hungry and tired and I wasn't listening to her, which makes her angrier. She wanted to go back and ask the jerk face we had just encountered if he knew where my family was. Personally I would have rather set fire to myself and gone for a jog around an oil refinery than go back and talk to him. The kids were now mad because they wanted out of their seats and suddenly we turned into a nest of contentious jackals on four wheels. We were all mad. Eventually we met up with everyone, went and had dinner, drove up to the campground and set up our tent. Sigh! everything seemed better now! Everyone was there except Dave. His campground site that we had reserved sat unoccupied. Several people drove through the campground slowly eyeing the empty site until they looked forward and saw all of us glaring at them and pounding our fists into our hands. some of us were shaking our heads "no." and others were making slashing motions across our throats. None of us were waving our arms up and down like they were on fire though. The camp site "shopper's" eyes would get big and they would gulp and drive on. Dave did finally arrive and set up his trailer and the campground host came around and explained that he felt that Dave should not have gotten the campsite because he arrived later.... um, I'm not the first one to tell you that I am no genius. But, isn't that what a reservation is for??? I am pretty sure that is why we made the reservation over a year in advance. I don't know. Maybe these hosts get a commission off of the campground. Maybe he was upset because he had run out of toilet paper. Maybe he heard there were people terrorizing the townsfolk of the nearby town of Stanley by driving 15 MPH in a 5 MPH zone... who knows. The next day my brother-in-law Terrell pulled his truck in to his parking spot, pulled through and ended up parking on off of the parking pad a bit. "Uh-oh" I thought "Campground host Adolf isn't gonna like this one." Sure enough, a while later the host puttered by in his truck. When he saw the infraction he got out of the truck walked up to the nearest person which happened to be Shawn and said "You are going to move this truck NOW!" Then he turned around, got back in his truck and left. Later that same day we went to a nearby ghost town. As we were leaving the campground they had the road closed down to a single lane so that they could do some logging and tree removal of some trees that had been blown down in a huge storm they had the week before. There were flaggers on the road and were only letting small groups go through each way. Kimball was driving behind a family on bikes. Mom was in the front seat and Dave, Cheryl and Larisa were in the back seat. When the flaggers waved them on Kimball who is a very careful and courteous driver got in the opposite lane (as there was no oncoming traffic thanks to the flagger on the other end holding up traffic) and proceeded to slowly go around the group of bikers. Now I have explained my position about sharing the road as a biker in previous posts. As a biker you carefully tiptoe along roads with no shoulder like you were sneaking out of a den of hibernating bears. I struggle with bikers who ride two, three or even four abreast on these roads. The father of this group took this mentality to a completely higher plane of stupidity. He began to wander over in front of Kimball, Wave and yell at him to get back. (Once again with the waving and yelling... maybe it was the same guy. I will give it to him that there were kids around this time) Kimball proceeded to carefully and cautiously pass in the other lane far away from where his family was riding. Dave is one of those people that says what he is thinking, so as they passed, Dave rolled down his window and yelled "Get out of the road KNUCKLEHEAD!!!" The biker did not take this character assessment well and yelled back "YOU WANT TO GET OUT OF THE CAR AND FIGHT ABOUT IT???" I really liked the things this biker was teaching his children. Dave either did not feel like giving this guy's family another lesson... this time on what NOT to do or it could have been that Kimball was driving and wasn't going to stop for Dave to get out. Nevertheless there was no more yelling and arm flailing to be had.

After the ghost town we stopped at a hot springs that fed into the Salmon River. Where the spring trickled into the river there were several pools blocked off by rocks. The highway ran right next to the river and there was a pull off from the road next to some old bath houses that were still standing there. At one point a truck pulled over and a family piled out. The kids wandered around and gazed at the river. Their mother trailed behind making sure they didn't get themselves into trouble. Lagging behind their father lumbered down the path. Not looking at where he was going. Ignoring the sites around him. Instead he fixed his attention on a small GPS that he cradled in his hands. He was looking at it, adjusting it, entering things into it and studying the information relayed back to him. Frustrated with his father's inattentiveness one of the kids said "Dad... why did you bring that?" His dad glared down at him and said "So we don't get lost!" To which his son pointed back to the top of the trail and said "But why? The truck is parked right there!" How do you explain to a child that you have to use your GPS because other than work and home you never go anywhere to warrant the use of your $800 GPS that you just bought?

Just before sunset we all wandered down to the lake for family pictures. As we stood on the beach setting up for the picture, the lake in the background, stretching out to the giant sawtooth mountains lumbering above. We were facing the road where we came from. I could see our campground host had just pulled off the side of the road where we were at. We were a good distance from the road and I could see him sitting in his truck, glaring at us. Wondering if the satisfaction of limping down to the beach to knock our heads around a bit, out weighed the trouble it would take to actually hobble down there. He sat there in his truck for about 10 minutes, glaring at us imagining the ways he could yell at us and flail his arms. After a while he grew bored of waiting for us to return and he pulled slowly back onto the road and left.

I think this was close to our 25th annual reunion. Every year we have been afflicted with some sort of scourge. Every year I say "That was strange! I think I've seen it all now! We must have exhausted mother nature of ideas by now, for sure!" But every year it is something new. We have had mice, bats, skunks, bees, lightning, broken cars, sunburns, and unforgiving heat... to name a few. This year I think our scourge was yelling and flailing arms. Obviously I am pointing out the worst of the reunion. Making light of it and exaggerating it. The rest of the reunion, the parts I glazed over because they didn't lend to my topic of reunion misadventures. Those parts, the ones I skimmed over were fun and entertaining and went by way too fast. If I get a chance I will write more about those times. Thank you for a good reunion Lori! We all had fun!

After the