I’d Rather Be Camping

Summer has been so hectic as newlyweds, I seriously don't know how couples do it mid-semester! Travis got a new job as a sales rep for Elite IT, it's been a fun learning experience for him and a really exciting environment since it's all college students and they do fun games to make selling more entertaining. He's won us a huge bag of watermelon sour patch, a chik-fil-a gift card and was top salesman last week! Not to toot his horn but TOOT TOOT!

I'm still working on campus in addition to doing 2 internships. One is at the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center's Cardiac Rehab. It 's so fun as an aspiring nurse to get some hospital exposure and to work in a setting with real patients. Our patients all recently had open heart surgery, a stent inserted to unclog their arteries, a heart attack, or some kind of traumatic heart event. Our job is to take their vitals and take them on walks around the hospital floor so they can drain fluids from their chest and get their heart rate and oxygen levels to increase so they can recover sooner. It takes a lot of patience to work in a hospital, some of the patients can be cranky and upset, others are so funny and will just talk your ear off telling you their life stories, others are from the ICU and are extremely delicate and have a ton of wires and tubes you need to work around to get them out of bed. At the end of the day I always feel so warm and happy to have helped these people get out of the hospital and back to their families sooner, it truly is the healer's art (Matthew 10:8). My other internship is at a women only gym called Curves. There I help the women use the equipment properly, motivate them to push themselves harder, work out with them, and weigh and measure them to see their progress and set new goals for good health. It's awesome to do both internships because I'm getting both the preventative and internal approach to good health.

Amidst our busy schedules Travy & I have marked our calendar with all sorts of fun events and have found the time to be together and spend some quality time to unwind from the day to day. So for 4th of july weekend we decided to go camping with our buddy Benjamin! We packed our bags the wednesday night before, and thursday after work we headed straight to Payson Lakes. What a beaut!

After some exploring we found a little camp site with a fire pit by the road for easy access to the car. We built our tent, made our beds, and then took out our fishing poles for some dinner!

Sadly, there were no fish in the pond, only salamanders, dragonflies, and snakes, yup, snakes!

Since we had no luck fishing, the boys had the bright idea of catching a snake, which they did successfully with a stick and a machete. They gutted it, skinned it, and fried it up with some lemon pepper, yum! (fortunately the snake did enjoy a salamander as his last meal before his inevitable doom!)

Quite frankly, as tasty as the snake might have been, it didn't have enough meet on it for 3 people, so we cooked some pizza pockets and hot dogs for dinner instead. Always gotta have a back up when camping!

Sadly, we burnt our pizza pockets, too. So hot dogs it was! Then while the boys still attempted at fishing (they hadn't realized by this point that this lake had no fish) I made a delicious cherry peach cobbler. And as if we hadn't had enough bad luck, we forgot to bring utensils. So we made them out of a stick and foil! Mine got points for most realistic (middle). Travis & I are obsessed with the Alaskan Bush People show on TV, so we felt so accomplished and that they would be so proud of the spoons we made!

The cobbler was amazing, and the leftovers made excellent oat meal for breakfast the next morning after a night of sharing mission stories and experiences from our time in Chile. After breakfast we made some not-burnt pizza pockets for the road, packed up, and headed to some better lakes for fishing. Even though we caught absolutely nothing, forgot spoons, and burnt our first batch of pizza pockets, we made due and had such a blast being away from college town and enjoying the great outdoors! Isn't that what camping is all about anyways? Improvising?