High Adventure, Day 1

I got home from camp on Thursday, Craig got back Saturday, and then we had a few days at home, during which time I caught up laundry and grocery shopping, actually went to my job for a few hours, and then spent time with my friend Megan planning all the food for our next adventure.  Wednesday I was busy shopping for all that food, and cleaning the house and basement/guest bedroom because Jason was staying for the night.  Craig took him to this fun driving range near Richmond with a bunch of his friends while I went to book club with mine.  Once we were all home we gave ourselves one (frantic) hour to pack before we allowed ourselves to stay up way too late talking.  There was a lot from Jason we wanted to hear about!

And then Thursday morning we hugged Colton and Camille and Jason goodbye so he could drive them up to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Culpeper and we took all the youth in our ward to West Virginia to go whitewater rafting!

Because-- you know-- when we were planning out this summer, we figured there just wasn't enough camping! 😂  

I should also explain that our ward entails two school districts that start and end their school year two weeks off from each other, giving us only 8 weeks when all the youth are on summer vacation.  So we have to plan everything very strategically.

So!  This time it was High Adventure, something Craig has done with the youth every summer since he became bishop.  But this was the first time he was spending some real money on it, and it showed.  We stayed at this awesome place, Ace Adventure Resort, and filled our time there with ziplining, rafting, a water park filled with inflatable obstacle courses, and paint ball.  (And we didn't even have time for the ATVs or ropes course!)  When Craig first started planning this, he figured we would have maybe 20 people, but with all the new people moving in, and then extra people coming out of the woodwork because it looked so fun, we ended up having 34 people (6 grown ups, 16 boys, and 12 girls).  For comparison's sake, last year only 4 girls participated.  So, yeah, I'm not sure he would have tried this if he'd known ahead of time just how many people would be coming!

He'd rented two cabins, which each slept 16 people, so the young men completely filled one of the cabins, and the other could fit the young women and the grown women chaperones.  The grown men had to bring their own tents.  I could have been in the cabin with the girls, but I wanted to share a tent with Craig.  (My air mattress is probably cleaner and definitely more comfortable than the bunks in those cabins!)  Usually when we use this tent, we have two or three kids in it with us, so it felt very roomy now!  And unlike the tents at YWs camp, this one zips up and keeps the bugs out!  So it felt quite luxurious!  We also had flush toilets, sinks, and showers nearby, so this nearly counted as glamping, as far as I was concerned.

Craig got to drive the van full of girls, while I rode with a mom who was a little worried about getting sleepy and wanted company.  I was sad to miss out on singing along with all the Young Women, though!

The drive there took about three hours, and the more we drove, the worse the weather got.  We arrived to a cold, misty rain and it was a little disheartening.  Fortunately, Craig had asked Scott Huff to be ready with some games we could all play, and there was a covered area where we could stay dry, so while we waited for our first adventure, we played several variations of wink killer:

Scott explaining the rules for each iteration...

And before long the rain had stopped and it was time for ziplines!  We split into two groups, and I refused to risk dropping my phone, so all the pictures from here on out are Craig's (lucky him with a work phone that's much more easily replaced!)

Getting all geared up!

Don't let Ryder's funny faces fool you-- nothing scares this kid!

Isaiah, Topher, and Bentley

Liberty, Jadyn, and Kendra

Sabrina, Olivia, and Ella

Craig, Scott, and Perry.  (These three helped out together after the flooding in Kentucky last year and have been buddies ever since!)

Craig's group!

Topher and Bentley getting all clipped in

Part of the tour included these two sky bridges.  This first one was pretty cool-- you could pretend you were Indiana Jones or something while you walked across it!  But the second one...

...was a LOT more narrow and way scarier to cross!  Occasionally there'd be huge gaps between the boards, too!  I was fine, but I had to go very slowly, and I made sure I went last so I wouldn't have anyone on my tail urging me onwards (which, I learned on the first one, just made me nervous).  I can do things like this, but I have to go at my own pace!

And then, after that last terrifying bridge, we came to our 9th and final zipline and it was... almost a dead drop of 30 feet?  Did I already mention that I'm afraid of heights?  Actually that isn't totally accurate-- just standing on heights is fine.  And ziplining off platforms was kind of scary, but I was mostly okay after the first one.  But jumping from heights truly scares me.  How did I end up here?  But there wasn't really any way to back out of it now.  So I sat on the platform facing the drop and told our guide that he was going to have to push me and that I was definitely going to scream.  He told me he was going to count and that I needed to lean forward on three, and all it took was the littlest of nudges from him and down I went, fully delivering on that scream!

The kids wanted me to flip upside down and act like Spider-Man once I'd passed the platform a couple times (as everyone else was doing and which the guides had told us was perfectly fine), but just dropping from that height was as much as I needed to do to prove myself.  I was done.  Whew.  How do I end up in these situations?