Mini M & M's: September 2009

We had a great time in Lake Powell a couple weeks ago with some awesome friends in our ward. We had such a fun time boating, playing in the sand, jumping off the houseboat, sliding down the slide, jumping on the water trampoline, playing games, watching movies, face painting and just hanging out with friends. The weather was perfect!! And the kids loved it!!!

Don't know why it say's the year 2004. Ignore!

This is "R" in the back of the boat paddling us out.......proceed to the following story.

Lake Powell isn't Lake Powell without an adventure, right? One day 3 adults (myself and "R" being 2 of the adults) and 10 kids ranging from ages 3-12 went on a boat ride to hike some Indian ruins. It is about a 30 minute boat ride and about 15 minutes into it the boat overheated. We sat in the middle of the channel for about 15 minutes to let the boat's engine cool off and then we headed back to the houseboat. We were approx 5 minutes away from the houseboat and the boat was running great so we turned back around and headed back to the Indian ruins. The boat did great and we got there with no other problems. We hiked to the top looked around for a bit and then headed back down. When we got to the boat we were hot and very thirsty and pretty much downed all the water and gatorade we had on the boat. We all got ready to head back and the boat wouldn't start......it was completely dead! Ummmmmm.......what to do? The two men on the boat ("R" being one of them who I might add had a cracked rib at the time) started paddling us out. The poor guys were just sweating like pigs and had very little water left at this point. We eventually got more out in the open and started having other boaters stopping to see if we needed help......which obviously we did. One boat had an extra battery which wasn't what our boat needed, one boat just went right by video tapping us ......guess we did look kind of weird. 2 men, one woman (me) and 10 freakin kids! Another boat went by and called us Jon and Kate plus 8. Nice!!! Anyway's long story short a very nice family from Kaysville, Ut told us they could at least tow us to the marina. 3 broken ropes and 3 hours later we finally made it to the marina at about 8:30 at night. I forgot to add that not only did we not have enough water, we had no food and no cell phones. Dah!! We thankfully had a group of incredible kids with us who remained calm and didn't complain even though we know they were a bit frightened and starving. I also might add that because we had no cell phone so we knew that the other parents at the houseboat were probably in a major panic. I would have been, not knowing what was going on, if we were safe, etc. We had left at 2:00 and by now it is 8:30 and its dark. We walked the docks trying to find someone who could help us and we found a couple different people who were willing to help. People really are amazing! We all piled in to this man's boat and headed out in the pitch dark, lightening all around and the other "R" who thankfully knew how to get us back to the houseboat. A 20 minute boat ride took us almost 2 hours in the dark. We finally arrived back at 10:30 to moms, dads, kids balling their eyes. They told us they had done everything they could back at the houseboat to help us but kept running into problems. Everyone was definitely relieved! Like I said always an adventure......we are just glad nobody was hurt.

This is "W" with a couple of her friends still smiling as the men are paddling us out. They didn't know at this point how long they were actually going to be sitting in this boat:-)