A Week (or two) of Wilkeyness

Sheesh. It's been a while since I've blogged. Life, you know.

But I do have some photos and commentary to share, all of which have an element of Wilkeyness. So on to the photos! First, fishing:

Forrest took the boys and Darrin and the Wilkey boys fishing on a cold UEA weekend Friday. They bundled up and started reeling 'em in.
Ethan looks too cool for fish, doesn't he? (He was already too cool for school. UEA weekend and everything. Ba dum bah!)

Max won the prize for ginormous-trout-catching. Isn't she a biggie? The guys had a great time seeing that one reeled in.


That's a biiiig fishie! Forrest came home and smoked a couple up, too, and they were tasty.

So that was two weekends ago. Last weekend Forrest and I left the kids at home with Mindy & Pete (THANK YOU!) and took off with a whole gaggle of Wilkeys to visit Moab. Interestingly, I'm a lifelong Utahn who's never been to Moab, never traversed the slickrock trail, never seen Delicate Arch, so we thought we'd round out our year of National Parking (Zions, Bryce, Yellowstone, etc.) by visiting Arches. I was hoping when we woke up at 5 a.m. on Friday to meet the rest of the family for the "unimog" (explanation below) that it would be worth it . . . and it was!

Handsome husband, handsome view.


An actual dinosaur track. I guess they're all over the place up there. See Mom? They ARE real! :-0
This is the unimog, the vehicle which (that?) spurred us to wake up at 5:15 on Friday morning and speed to Moab so we could meet the rest of the Wilkeys for a 9:30 ride. It's basically a big ol' jeepish kinda truck thing (don't you love my technical vocabulary here?) that's all tricked out so it can traverse the Moab terrain and almost tip over, but not quite. The unimog you see here is a bigger version--we were behind on a smaller one.

The couple-shot.


Taking to the hills. They call it "slickrock," which is a terrible misnomer because the sandstone in Moab is just about the stickiest rock I've ever walked on. It's almost like hiking on sandpaper. Made it easier to get over some (SOME) of my paralyzing fear of heights and scramble around a little.


Up, up, up!!


Scanning the vistas.


A bunch-o-Wilkeys, looking happy.


And uuuuuup, uup, up. (This hill was at a 45% angle. Luckily our drivers were good. Or so they told us.)


Later that day we hiked up to Delicate Arch. (That's Forrest and me in the right corner.) This iconic symbol of my state is iconic for good reason--it's breathtaking. Pictures don't do it justice.
This is an example of the type of thing that triggers my height-phobia. Although I went up there with everybody else I had to keep my eyes straight ahead, and I'm afraid that if I brought my kids on this hike I'd have a full-on panic attack.


Pretty picture, no?

At 83 years old, Muriel managed the strenuous 3 mile round-trip hike all the way to Delicate Arch. Here's hoping I can be like Muriel when I'm 83 (although she had 14 kids, so there's a chance she's tougher than me).


This was another hold-my-breath, look-straight-ahead-and-scurry moment. A bunch of us went off the beaten path so we could get a different view of the arch and I decided to be a good sport and go along.
Here we are, post-scurrying.


And here's the worth-scurrying-for view.


(And here too, sans blurry, windblown people.)


Sunset, on the way down from Delicate Arch.

The next morning we explored some other nooks and crannies in Arches National Park.

A rock formation that looked suspiciously like Garth in profile.


The Windows. We also scurried up inside this arch--but I don't have any pictures of it (until Quinn emails them to me, at least. Hint, hint?). This was the scariest scurry for me. I was okay once I sat down but couldn't look behind me, and there were people who had some little kids up in there, running around like mountain goats, and it was all I could do not to yell at them: "Don't you realize your children are going to plummet to their deaths?!?!?!?" Which would have ruined everybody's fun, I realize. (Not the plummeting. My yelling. Although, come to think of it, my yelling would have ruined things a lot less than the plummeting could have . . .)


Another handsome husband, handsome view.


This is a baby rattlesnake that slithered by in the parking lot of Landscape Arch. It ended up under somebody's car, then on top of this woman's backpack. Initially, the woman thought Forrest was trying to steal her backpack, but when she realized he was moving a rattlesnake off of her backpack with a stick her mood turned from indignation to terror to gratitude for Forrest's baby snake wrangling.


And this is Landscape Arch. We hiked in to see it but were running out of time (it was almost 2:00, nobody had eaten, we had to get back on the road to get home before nighttime), so we just snapped a few pics from a not-so-primo spot and high-tailed it home.

We had a wonderful trip. So fun. Nature! You know? And the Wilkeys are a great bunch to hang out with and we're so glad they include us; even without the DNA test to prove our family ties they saved us a spot on the Unimog. Thanks Wilkeys for a great weekend!

(Oh, and to extend the Wilkey Weekend, we hosted Extended Wilkey FHE at our house on Sunday night. Needless to say, our house was full to the brim w/ Wilkeys, but, alas, no pictures. But many chocolate chip cookies eaten and good to see a bunch of kids and grandkids who didn't go to Moab.)

And I'll end with a slight departure: a video that contains to Wilkeyness whatsoever. But it does contain a cute boy and some washable magic markerness: