Where did June go!

The rain has gone and the hot weather has begun in west Texas. But fortunately for us it is not humid, nor is it hot the whole day. We have done really well and have only turned our AC on 4 times! And only for a couple of hours! We are so happy that we live on the bottom floor and that we have nice, quiet ceiling fans. In other news, where did the month of June go!!??? It flew by! It's already time for July? Summer is going by way too fast!

The past couple of weeks have been good to us. We were able to take a last minute trip to Dallas and visit KL, Taylor and Fife. It was really good to see them!  And it fell on the weekend of Colby's Birthday, so we were able to celebrate with some family. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of all our good times (besides the below from instagram) because I got a new phone and forgot to download my pictures from my old phone. But at least I have a few! While in Dallas we went bike riding and played outside in the pool and saw the Archibald's (Taylor's Parents) family cat carrying a huge lizard by its head! It was gross! hahaha!

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but Colby and I team teach the 12 and 13 year old's for Sunday School. The church has a new program called Come Follow Me which is amazing! I love the new way we prepare for our classes and the participation of the kids. We have a great group of kids we teach! Also, we gave talks on Sunday. It was good for us, even though that morning before church I literally could not eat anything because I was so nauseous! I was able to take 2 bites of a banana and that almost got to me! But I am just so glad it is over and that I don't have to speak in church for at least a year! However, we will see how long Colby lasts! hahaha After Sacrament meeting our bishop made a comment to Colby about how he could see Colby as a future High Council Man because Colby did such  a great job and was able to take up a lot of the time. :) 

The pool at our apartment has been really nice to have with the hot weather. It is nice and refreshing! This past Friday we had a pool party with fellow BYU friends who are also all Geologists! We love living here and hanging out with so many friends! We have been looking for houses, but are not really looking to buy for awhile. We are hoping the housing prices drop soon because everything here is so expensive, but it has been nice to just drive around and get the feel of neighborhoods and seeing where we would like to end up!

Friends with their babies :) 

And the boys playing 500 with water toys! 

Pagosa Springs

For the past week we have been in Colorado. Colby was able to attend the AAPG Geology Conference in Denver, so we jumped on the opportunity to go! We stayed with my family during the week and then once the weekend came we drove down to Pagosa Springs. Right before the town of Pagosa Springs we drove through Wolf Creek Pass. At the overlook of the pass is my absolute favorite place in the world! I love making this drive (and have several times). We always stop at the lookout just to take in it's beauty! My dream one day is to have a cabin in the mountains in this area of beautiful Colorado! I'm so happy we were able to spend the weekend here! We went hiking to treasure falls, visited Chimney Rock, looked for geodes and fossils, visited a wildlife park, went to the hot springs and went fishing.

Wolf Creek Pass

Treasure Falls

Chimney Rock and Ancient Ruins of the Chaco culture about 1100 A.D 

Chimney Rock. Want to know more? Click Here

The Rocky Mountain Wildlife Park

This fence did not look strong enough for this Grizzly! 

I was thinking how I am really glad the wolves can't get to me. 

They probably would have eaten me if they could! 

Can you believe this view!!? Gorgeous! 

Colby's monster Bass. In all, we caught 7 fish! 

Pagosa Springs Hot Springs! 

After a few days we parted ways with my family and drove part of the way back to Midland. We drove through Chama, New Mexico and camped one night at Lake Heron's State Park. The view was beautiful and we did a little bit of fishing (caught nothing), but we had fun. The next morning we had planned to look for fossils again at the lake's edge,but of course the weather had different plans. It rained hard for a while. We could hear the thunder coming and decided to put our stuff in the car. We got everything in the car right before the rain...except the tent. We waited while the storm passed through. It looked nice and clear, so we made a fire and let the tent dry a bit. But not 30 minutes later we saw more dark looming clouds and once again the rain came hard. So we finally gave up and just packed up the tent wet and drove home.  

Lake Heron

Memorial Weekend 2015

Severe Thunderstorms is the best word to describe memorial weekend. So severe that while camping our phones regularly gave us warning alerts for tornado watches/warnings, and flash flood watches and warnings. But before our camping excursion Colby and I made a quick stop at Hamilton Pool. It's about 40 minutes away from Austin and was stunning, even if it was raining lightly. You were not allowed to swim in it (even though you have been able to in the past), but I'm glad we went.

Can you find Colby? 

Back to our camping trip. Our tent is 4 years old and held up pretty well in the hard rain! But the water underneath our slim sleeping pads was enough that I didn't want to sleep in the tent. We slept in my sisters car. Although the seats could be laid back it was one of the worst night's of my life. I think next time I'm just going to toughen up and sleep in the tent! That was the first and last time I will sleep in a car. It was terrible. I hardly slept. And it was raining bad enough that we didn't want to drive home in it so we stayed.

I wish the pictures could really show you how bad the rain was hahaha it got worse as it got dark. 

Besides us having to sleep in the tent it rained all day. We moved our fire pit under our tarp and sitting area, so we could avoid the rain a bit, but since everything was wet the fire was very smoky! So we took the logs off and just used charcoal to cook our food, which was delicious! We had tin-foil dinners and dutch-oven peach cobbler for dessert. Since it was raining we didn't get to walk around much. We played card games, listened to music and played 20 questions and watched a movie in the car because we didn't want to be outside in the rain anymore.

The next morning it had finally stopped raining, but everything was drenched. However, the sun finally came out. We laid everything out to dry and then we took a drive to assess the damage. We drove down to the shore and found it mostly abandoned from people leaving the night before. We even  found some camps that didn't care about packing up and just left their camp as is because they didn't want to pack it up in the hard rain, so they just left everything. We saw lots of tents and canopies destroyed and mangled. Then we drove to a boat ramp that we had been to the day before to see how much the water rose. The water rose about 5 feet in one night!! There was also a destroyed and beached floating dock.

That boat dock is not supposed to be there...it wasn't there the day before!!

Then, last but not least, when we were leaving Austin on memorial day we had to pull over a few times because the storms were so bad you couldn't see anything and we had to drive through areas that had tornado warnings. I'm glad we got out when we did because the flooding only got worse and I did not want to be stuck there!

On Sunday we took a quick walk through a park that was filled with peacocks! 

In all we made some great memories! But I still wanted to have a better camping experience and actually sleep in our tent. So the next day after we got home I surprised Colby and after work we had Family Home Evening camp out style in the living room!