West Virginia Trip: Starring ☆☆☆Bentley☆☆☆

AYO

It's Bentley, again.  Mom keeps making me do this. 

So, a bit more than a month ago the youth in our ward and another different ward went to West Virginia. We went camping, caving, swimming, and just had a good time. It wasn't perfect, but for West Virginia, it was pretty good. I did learn I don't enjoy dark enclosed spaces so that's cool. And these were some very dark, very enclosed spaces.

Now, one of the reasons this was a favorite camping trip of mine was the shortness of it. People get it in their head that it's better to spread out a few fun things over a few days.  I prefer doing multiple fun things in one day and then going.  Maybe that's true in some scenarios it's better to spread out fun stuff, but not camping. When you camp, you get in and you get out.

So Friday night, right after school our youth group met and got into a few cars, and drove to where it's Wild and Wonderful. We got there really late, around 10 or so, set up a tent, played some card games, and went to bed since we were gonna have an early morning. 

Ryder and Bro. Huff playing cards. I was also there, as you can tell by the blurry guy with the black sweatshirt and white shorts in the background. 

That morning we woke up at around six, ate food, and started driving towards a cave. First we stopped at this cool hill that over looked a valley:

Swag

Craig and his favorite son

Craig and his other son

Notice how unhappy I look. Mostly because I was tired, and about to climb in a muddy cave.

Safety First! Also, Look! I'm Smiling

This guy heard Wild 'n' Wonderful' and made it his Whole Personality.

Our tour guide was a really old man who really loved caves. He wasn't a member, and he used plenty of what I call 'bible swears.'  Anyway, he was really old, but kept up with Ryder's hyper self, and was probably faster at crawling through the caves than I was. 

Me worried our cave guide might die at any point and we will be lost in the cave forever.

Unfortunately, it was hard to take photos that show the more intense parts of the cave, but there were sections where we were army crawling our way through. Here is one of a few places where we got to stand.

Ryder, after committing multiple felonies

At one point the cave was shaped like a 'V' and you had to kinda wall jump so you didn't get trapped in between the walls of the cave.

Cave dwellers circa 30,000 bce

(I had to look up when cave people were around and apparently Homo Sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. That sounds like a lot but, any the first versions of humans were around 6 million years ago. So Homo Sapiens only make up around 3% of all human existence (and farming only began 12,000 years ago, which is when I kinda think humanity began). Now, 3% sounds like a small amount, BUT, earth has been around for 4.54  BILLION years, so Homo Sapiens have only been around for about 0.004% of the earths existence, and if Farming Homo Sapiens have only been around for 0.000264% of the earth's existence. The more you know.)

Look how muddy we are. Surprisingly, after washing the clothes, they were fine!

W/ Dad

After the cave, we ate food at the church.  I don't know what they put in those sandwiches, but they were delicious.  If you ever have the chance to eat post-cave sandwiches, I highly recommend. 10/10.  Something about being all muddy and then washing up and putting on clean clothes just makes food taste better.  Next we went down to this river and went inner-tubing.  It was really cold, and pretty shallow so you would get stuck on rocks, but it was pretty fun. 

There was a rope swing, but I did not participate because it was shallow and I didn't want to fully submerge in the water. 

Here is me being calm, cool, collected, charismatic, captivating, ceaseless, celebrated, celestial, centered, ceremonial, charming, chatty, cheeky, cheerful, colorful, comfortable, commanding, committed, compact, compassionate, and cosmic

Dad took this photo in a water proof case so it's blurry, but here is the only family photo I could find. Family minus dad's upper half

After the tubing we started the drive back home. The van had overheated at some point earlier and for about half an hour I was terrified it would happen again. When we would go up hill and the engine would roar (cuz yah know, big van, normal engine) I was shaking in my boots, my timbers shivered. Eventually I conked out to some calming rap (Caleb is praying for my soul right now).  Luckily, the van didn't die and we made it to the parking lot where this whole adventure had started.

I was under the impression that we were just unpacking the van and going, but then they took a group photo! Without Me! If you were to highly edit the photo you might see my silhouette to the left of Dad's head through the window. If you look closely though, you will see Ryder is mid-sneeze, and half the people are blinking or not smiling so it wasn't a great group photo anyway. 

Oh dear. 

Anyway, I would say this was a pretty good West Virginia Multi-Ward Camping, Floating, Caving Extravaganza of 2022 (WVMWCFCE'22 for short). Main complaint was the cold water, and waking up early on a Saturday. I would give this trip one post-cave sandwich/10.  If you have questions, oh well. Hopefully I don't do anything exciting enough to blog about for a while. Thanks for reading.

Portraits!

I loved last year's portraits so much that when Adam said the wildflowers were in bloom at Pippin Hill, we hurried right back!  We lucked out and managed to squeeze in our photo session between rain storms.  We didn't have the amazing golden lighting that we got last year, but the grey weather did make for very even lighting, so that was nice.  I'd like to say the cloud cover helped me not blink/squint too much, but we all know that blinking for pictures is my superpower.  (That, and always choosing the slow line at the grocery store check out!)  Adam hasn't sent me all the pictures yet, but here are just a few that I really liked:

The shots of everyone walking holding hands are so cheesy but I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

This candid shot is the best

I told Craig to cover up my double chin and this turned out so hilarious and cute

Ryder looks like he's suspended by a wire.  Colton looks like he's about to take flight.

Homecoming and Corn Mazes!

Some of the things we were up to this last week...

I finally ordered new glasses for Ryder!  His prescription only changed a little bit, but I figured it would be nice to have more than just one pair of glasses going forward...

And it was homecoming week at the kids' school!  It was fun to see them participate in some of the dress up days-- Kendra almost always participates in stuff like that, Bentley not so much.  But even he couldn't resist the pull of Pajama Day!

Monticello was playing Fluvanna, the other main high school in our congregation, so a bunch of the kids came out and watched Kendra perform!  l-r we have Topher, Madeline, Emily, Kendra, and Joe (The word on the street is that Topher likes Emily and Joe likes Kendra, so these boys were really playing their cards right! 😂)

In a surprise move, Monticello actually won (first time this year, I believe?), and the kids got so excited they stormed the field in the most polite, rule-following way Craig had ever seen.  (I managed to convince Bentley to actually attend; I was glad to see him being social, but then that meant I had to stay home with the little kids and did not get to see Kendra's performance!  Everything has a price, I guess...)

Saturday morning Ryder had a baseball game.  His team lost.  By a lot.  But Ryder got the only hit of the game and thanks to some very bad fielding, he managed to turn it into a home run that also brought in a runner on second, so that was fun at least!

As soon as he was done we hurried everyone out the door and got pizza for lunch at Dr. Ho's Humble Pie.  We don't often do stuff like this, so it was a special treat!  While Craig was in the bathroom, Bentley had the idea to take the following pictures:

So here we are having a great time...

...until Craig joins us, where we promptly all look unhappy!

Bentley is funny!  Poor Craig!  

And then once we were stuffed, we drove further down 29 to the Blue Ridge Mountain Maze!  It was a perfect day for it and we had a lovely time:

Playing Connect 4

And Jenga

Camille LOVES horses right now and cannot for the life of her understand why we won't buy her one...

And we all really enjoyed launching tiny apples!  (I also appreciated Craig gently suggesting that I not turn my back to the camera for this endeavor, if I wanted pictures that I would enjoy.  He was right about that!)

Cute sisters!

This is leaving the corn maze-- I love that you can see the mountains in the distance!

Despite everyone running all over the place, we actually finished the maze all together!

The corn is indeed "as high as an elephant's eye!" 🎶

And Bentley did this:

Even watching this video sort of makes me want to throw up, but I love that he's goofy enough to go for it!

So that was a fun way to spend an afternoon!  

Next up was a surprise party for our neighbor at the local brewery, so that was Craig and my first time going to Random Row (which is partially owned by other neighbors, so we hear about it a lot!).  It has a very fun atmosphere, but I was a little disappointed that the only food they served was pizza.  No nachos or fries or anything else?  But it didn't really matter because we couldn't stay for long,  anyway.  Basically we yelled Surprise when our neighbor arrived, and then hightailed it home so we could take Kendra and a couple of her friends to the homecoming dance!

Madeline, Kendra, and Natalie

Pretty girls!

So it was a busy weekend, but a lot of fun!

Once More with Feeling

I came out of my bathroom to find my children pretending to be dead:

They're just so weird.  And what's even weirder is the fact that this isn't the first time they've done this!!!

Seriously.  Someone explain what I'm doing wrong that this is what counts for fun around here???