Every year (occasionally every other) my mom's family rallies the troops and trek's to our cabin up in Lake Almanor for the work weekend. Every summer the family divides and shares weeks of vacation up at the cabin, which happens to be my favorite place in the world, but before this can happen, the cabin needs to be worked on and readied for another season of fun. This past weekend was that weekend.
With approximately 5.5 hours of driving on our schedule, this certainly qualified as a road-trip for Joey and myself, which meant one very important thing...
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| Burger King, Mc Donalds & Taco Bell |
Road Trip Multi-Fast-Food-Pit-Stop! Only three spots this time, but they were they solid. I chose Burger King Fries, McDonalds Chicken McNuggets & a Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supreme. And some tums to finish it off. Joe's a big McDonalds fry fan so he got some and the verdict is in... Burger King fries are officially greater than McDonalds fries.
We arrived late Friday night and woke up early Saturday morning to this...
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| View from the front yard |
Not bad motivation for a "work weekend"eh? So once everyone had about seven cups of coffee each, we all grabbed some rakes and started attacking the pine needles. All pine needles within 50 feet of the cabins are required to be cleared for fire safety so we had a lot of work on our plates.
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| Uncle Steve, Aunt Karen, Cousin Jack and Trent... Not even the kids get out of work weekend!! |
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| Uncle Mark, Joey & Micah |
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| Joey & Aunt Jenny |
All work and no play makes everyone cranky, so we made sure to add some play time to our weekend! Ever thrown rocks into a large body of water? It's kind of amazing how much fun it is.
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| Jack, throwing rocks |
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| Trent, throwing rocks |
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| Rubi, swimming after the rocks |
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| View of the cabin from the beach |
A long long time ago, my grandfather and his dad used to come to this site and camp before there was ever anything else here. Eventually they built this cabin which has become our entire family's home away from home.
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| Cousin Zach, clearly THRILLED to be here. |
For the record, I'm pretty sure I woke Zach up with this picture. He was napping with his eyes open :)
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| Incase you ever wondered where I got my laziness from... |
All that relaxing sure did work up our appetites. Time for some BBQ!
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| That's a lotta meat, can we even cook it all? |
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| Challenge Accepted. |
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| Dinner is served! |
I've been eating at this dining table since I was a baby being bathed in the sink that the dishes were washed in.
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| Sunset |
As the sun goes down, the bats come out and fly around eating the mosquitos. Sounds super creepy, but it's completely awesome and cathartic.
And the new addition to the cabin? A fire pit! 100% s'more friendly! It was a big, big hit.
Possibly the single best thing that came out of this weekend? The discovery of making s'mores with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as the chocolate. Insanely delicious.
Sunday morning we had some more work to do including dropping off the truck loads of pine needles at the local lumber yard.
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| Joey & me |
Everyone please note... photographic evidence that I did in FACT do something besides take pictures all weekend. I also took pictures WHILE wearing a hard hat.
Well that was certainly enough work for my taste, so once we got back it was time for more fun. And nothing says fun like building rockets and setting them off in the meadow! There are a lot of boys in my family... in case you can't tell.
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| Cousin Micah - the rocket master |
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| Cousin Jack's rocket |
Micah knows almost everything there is to know about rockets so he set everything up. Unforunately the trigger/ignitor was not working properly due to faulty batteries so Micah hooked up the next best thing...
Who needs batteries when we have a fully functional CAR battery. Yeah, that really happened. Micah re-worked the wires to the car battery and we had liftoff!
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| Bigger Rocket |
My uncle mark summed it up pretty well when he said, "less is good. more is better". Which apparently holds true for rocket size.
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| Aunt Karen & Cousin Jack |
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| My ruggedly handsome husband :) |
Jack's smile was about a mile wide after all that rocketry. It was priceless. Even the drive back to the cabin was exciting when we were enveloped with a family of cows.
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| My bro Kev, moo-ing at the cows |
Back at the cabin, the boys got the mini-tractor working and decided to look helpful...
I'm not sure what this had to do with the cabin chores, but I sure got a kick out of it. Joey's holding on for dear life while Micah tries to flip him off. Poor Joey married into this. I tried to apologize to him, but he just high-fived me.
One of the last things Joey and I did before leaving Monday morning was go on our walk around the block and take a peak over Hamilton Branch.
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| Hamilton Branch |
The last time we were in this spot (almost 2 years ago) Joey got down on one knee and proposed to me. It was so cool to come back and re-live the memory, something we get to come back to every summer of our lives.
All-in-all I'd say the weekend was a success. The cabin is ready for summer, my family is exhausted, and I feel completely blessed for the family that taught me how to work, how to love and how to laugh at everything.
