illguthlife: Family Vacation 2001

My family went to Bear Lake for our vacation in 2001. As usual my dad took a whole week off of work. On the first day of the vacation we went to the store and bought the food for the rest of the week. We bought everything according to a menu that we had all helped make. Everyone went to Food4Less and helped fill up the cart with everything needed to make hamburgers, hotdogs, tinfoil dinners, s'mores, and other yummy things. We also bought many cans of soda.

After we came home from the store we packed all of the gear we would need. We each packed our clothes and blankets. We also packed the two tents, pots and pans for cooking, and other camping things. We loaded everything into our 1977 Chevy Van. We didn't know it, but this would be the last time the van would take us on vacation. We'd had the van since my brother was born in 1991. Before that it had belonged to my grandparents. The van originally seated 12 people. But when we moved in 1992 we took out the bench seats so we could move furniture. For some reason we'd never put the front bench seat back in the van. So my mom and dad would sit in the driver and shotgun seats, then there would be a huge gap, then there would be a bench seat that with room for 3 people, and then the back seat with room for 4 people. When we went on vacation we'd fill the gap up with all our stuff. It generally was a disorderly pile of pillows, shoes, blankets, tents, food boxes, clothes, and everything else. It was a mess, but we didn't have to worry about not having room for all the stuff - we always had plenty of room.

That night we probably did some family thing and then went to bed early. In the morning we woke up early, shoved any last minute things onto the pile, and started driving. We drove on a somewhat familiar route. Up until about 1998 my family had hardly ever traveled north of Salt Lake City. We just didn't have any reason to. In 1998 we went to Logan for my cousin, Mallory's baptism. That is the first time I remember going to Logan. Another time we went to Logan to visit my uncle Johnny while he was going to school there. We followed him to my Grandma's new house in Idaho. The third time we went to Logan was in 1999 for Johnny's marriage to my aunt Cheryl. That time we stayed in a hotel. I'd been to Logan for Youth Conference in 2000. This trip to Bear Lake took us through Logan so it was the 4th time I'd traveled that route.
After driving the hour and a half to Logan we went somewhere I had never been before. We drove through the picturesque Logan Canyon. I was driving the van. The canyon road was under construction that summer. Parts of the road were turned into one way streets controlled by stop lights. A line of cars traveling north would wait at a red light while a line of cars traveling south would use the lane. Then the light would change and the north going cars would be allowed to use the road while the south cars waited.

After a very long time we finally made it out the other side of Logan canyon and saw Bear Lake. We stopped at the view point and admired the beautiful blue water.

We didn't go down to the water yet because we had to find our campsite. My dad had reserved a spot at the Sunrise Campground in the mountain above Bear Lake. We went there and set up camp. Like the year before we had two tents - the old spring-bar which was probably older than the van and the other tent our neighbors had given us with lots of poles but no directions.

Here we are in front of the spring bar. This is not a good picture of any of us. I was 16, Lindsey was 14, Emily was 12, Billy was 10, and Hillary was 8.

Eventually we made it down to the lake. There are lots of beaches at Bear lake. Some of them are privately owned, some of them are state owned and you have to pay a fee, and some of them are free. We went to one of the free beaches. We parked the van by the side of the road and carried our stuff down a long steap and sandy hill to the beach. Once there we had fun playing with the small shells that line the beach, digging in the sand, and playing in the water. I remember playing Marco Polo for hours.

At night we enjoyed doing traditional camping trip things like roasting marshmellows and making s'mores. Emily and Billy had a burping contest. Billy showed us all that he could burp the alphabet. He burped and burped and burped until my dad told him that was enough.

One evening we were all sitting around the fire when some people stopped by to talk to us. My parents recognised them as some old friends from the ward we lived in before we moved. They hadn't seen each other for about 10 years. They'd recognised the van and wondered if it was ours. They told my parents that they had finally graduated from medical school and the husband was working as a doctor. They'd bought a nice house. Then they told us a funny story. All during medical school they had lived in apartments where the neighbors would stay up late having drinking parties. They had told themselves, "as soon as we graduate and buy a house we will never have to hear a drunk person again." Yet now that they owned a house they had to listen to the drinking parties that the neighbor kids threw when their parents were out of town. I've always remembered that story as an example of not dreaming your problems away.

One day Hillary was getting the cooler of soda out of the van when it fell out of her hands. The cans crashed around in the cooler and some of them somehow sprang leaks and started spraying all over Hillary. She was covered in cherry soda.