Lake Powell has been known as great adoration and vexation to my family. We have been going there with all the extendeds since I was little and have had many adventures. This particular year we acquired 1 totaled boat and 1 damaged jet ski (who's repair cost was over $800), But this was hardly surprising, considering our past experiences.
The disastrous trip of '06 had actually 2 totaled ski boats, a missing house boat, 1 ruined rental boat, a jack-knifed trailer, two fragile females--one 1 month old, the other 94, and 1 double-layered raspberry chocolate cake afloat in the melted ice water of a stranded cooler. SO 1 boat and 1 jet ski was hardly a thing to consider.
The first day of this year's Lake Powell trip my aunt accidentally replaced her eye drops with hydrogen peroxide. She did not go blind, but sported a pair of nicely swollen and dripping eye-lids for the rest of the trip. On the way down one of the trip's toddlers slammed his foot in the car door so had to go around the whole time hobbling on a bandaged leg.
Day two one of the jet skis swallowed a rope. All the men in our tribe lifted it up out of the water and dissected it on the beach and removed the offensive strand of nylon. They then put it back together and replaced it on the water. Also, in the evening, one of my cousins did his traditional glow stick dance. This sounds kind of weird/awkward but he tied 2 glow sticks on the ends of strings and spun them around, kind of like fire torches. Turn out the fire and turn on the techno and it's actually quite cool. Afterwards he handed out glow sticks to the little kids.
Naturally this creates a problem: badly tied knots with plastic tubes on the end swung around at the greatest possible speed with a whole crowd of people standing around to watch. Luckily no one got pelted with a flying glow stick, but one kid (my brother, actually) started swinging it out of control and the string + glow stick swung down between his legs. He collapsed instantly into the fetal position on the sand, moaning and groaning like a truly injured man. He was a little more cautious in his next approach to the glow sticks.
Day 3: This day one of the jet skis actually swallowed a stick. The whole dissection process happened again, with equal success. One cousin speared a fish. That was exciting. Everyone was so surprised that it actually worked that no one knew what to do about it. The fish ended up dying, I'm sure, due to a large gaping hole in its body. It took a while to get the spear out, first of all because no one wanted to touch it, and second because the fish kept moving.
Day 4: I enjoyed watching young children biff on their face while trying to learn the wakeboard. Put those kids in life jackets and they are haaaardy. Our Jedi told some stories around the camp fire. One of them was about a Chinese boy trying to get to some holy mountain. On the way he met a whole bunch of obstacles, one of which was a leopard. The whole time my mom thought he had been saying leaper. She was just astonished that the kid would through a rock straight into the face of a diseased man, and even more astonished when no one else seemed perturbed. She didn't get it 'til the next day.
Day 5: This day we cleaned up and went home. Naturally it took 3x longer than we had expected. Finally crammed into our car we got a call from an aunt whose car had broken down due to some busted water pipes. We crammed their luggage and people into the remaining cars and left the lemon with a cousin to wait for the new part to come in. On the way home our car overheated once and we got lost 2 or 3 times. But we returned, safe though a little harried.
It's a long story, but I found it amusing.
