We Came Back to Aspen Grove

Aspen Grove is a BYU alumni family camp just up the road a few more miles from Sundance. Growing up, Aspen Grove was just about the only vacation we ever took. To celebrate her 90th birthday, Grandma Taylor wanted her progeny to all to come to Aspen Grove again, and we happily obliged. We hadn't been there since 2007! The whole trip was full of good-natured nostalgia and making new memories. I cam with controlled expectations and had a very good time. It was just so nice to know I'd be getting three square meals a day. Now I'm going to try to get through the week as succinctly as possible, but I do have more than 100 pictures to post.

SATURDAY: Arrived in the late afternoon and found the rest of my family quickly. Gave the camp a good walking around and checking on, had our first dinner, went to the family-introducing meeting where we all glowed with pride as Grandma introduced our group and the reason for our gathering and then the big opening campfire happened.

SUNDAY: The main thing Sunday was our celebration of Grandma. And then nice quiet family time and stuff. Not too much to report.

MONDAY: Okay, NOW we're getting serious. Monday morning many of us tried out the High Adventure ropes course and shot guns. That afternoon was the famous Aspen Follies field games where we debuted our family t-shirt. Look at all these pictures of us having fun on the field! Why spoil it with some extra details about the water balloon launch? Before dinner I played an Deluxe Sized round of D&D with all the cousins and in the PM Andrew came up to camp to reunite with the family and for me to give him a grand tour and show him the A frame where we used to stay on our very earliest trips to camp.

TUESDAY: Tuesday morning I took a hike with Mom, Dad, Owen and Emily to the waterfall on the way to Mt Timpanogos. When we got back to camp Jon, my old counselor from 1993 was there! One of his sons is now an Aspen Grove counselor. Wow. Man. What a world. After lunch we did laser tag and then I showed Walker how to pose with a wooden snake. 

WEDNESDAY: Wednesday morning the youngsters had their chance to try out the High Adventure course and cousin Scotty talked his way on (I leant him my shoes since he only wears flip flops because he goes to college in Hawaii). I spent the afternoon/evening in Salt Lake, no pictures of that because IT WASN'T ASPEN GROVE.

THURSDAY: I believe I spent the day in classes or something? Maybe reading or taking a nap or something? I don't remember. There's no pictures. But in the afternoon I hiked to Stewart Falls on my own. Here's a photo Mom took of me at the trailhead in case I didn't come back. As you may be able to tell, I had my Leica with me, BUT I left my SD card behind. So no pictures from the hike. Oh well. But also Thursday was hamburger day, a day I'd been looking forward to all week. And when I got back from my hike I was all dirty so I put the reunion shirt back on (I'm telling you that because I don't want the costume change to throw you off and have you think this is two days worth of pictures). In the evening we had the closing campfire (there's a picture of when they had all the adults come up to sing Sweet Caroline after all the kid groups came up to sing their songs. And then we took a lot of pictures And now I feel it important to clarify that, along with all the Taylor descendants, Dad's brother Greg's whole family was there, too. So it was a family reunion with a bonus side-reunion. After that it was the big family dance, I hope you saw the videos from it that I posted on Instagram that night. And we stayed up late, like, until 10, maybe 11, sitting around and talking and then we went to bed.

FRIDAY: Well, things for me got crazy when I discovered, as I was packing up, that my wallet had totally disappeared. This kind of messed the whole rest of the day up for me, knowing I needed to get on a flight that evening and then the next night and also just trying to figure out if I had dropped it somewhere, left it somewhere, got it stolen, or what. So. No pictures. Frantic ending. But a great trip up until then and still not so bad in spite of the wallet loss.

Thing to Note: Two posts ago I filled this blog with pictures of my family together in Chicago for the 4th of July. Now here's this post full of family pictures for August. And next weekend we'll all be together in Idaho for Owen's wedding. This is a dang family photo blog now. Thanks for stopping by.