Rapsure Blog

This year for the annual family vacation we went to Pine Lake which is near Bryce Canyon. This vacation was bigger than last year's because there were more people. In one years worth of time another child was added and this time Stacy and her children stayed.

The total head count for the vacation was my parents and five more adults. With the nieces being a total of five. The total number of people on the vacation was twelve and hence there was a lot of work to do.

On top of the total people there were the toys. The toys included two four wheelers, two motorcycles, and I took my two bikes. Also Amber brought her bikes and so did Stacy.

The activities included: visiting Bryce Canyon, fishing, four wheeling, motorcycle riding, mountain biking, and sitting around a campfire. My nieces loved going for rides on the four wheeler. The four wheeler couldn't even the running without all of the nieces running over and wanting to go on a ride. It was cute to see them always playing with each other and being friends. Now I did almost freeze Bethany to death because she begged and wanted to go for a wheeler ride after the cold front came through on May 18th. I thought that they might be warm enough with coats but I was wrong. When the front came through the temperature dropped from about 70 degrees to 46 degrees with a strong north wind. Even though the children had coats on their insulation was not sufficient and so I had to give Bethany my jacket to help get her back to camp. However the cold front was not sufficent reason to stop me from going on a bike ride.

This entry would not be complete without a follow up from last years vacation. Last year a new truck had been purchased and what a relief that was. The truck that did the pulling of the fifth wheel was a Chevrolet Silverado LTZ 3500 with the eight foot bed, and with the Duramax 6.6 engine. The truck pulled the trailer a lot better and got better fuel economy. The old gas engine can't even really compete with the diesel engine when it comes to pulling.

Even though the truck didn't have any problems does not mean that there were a lack of issues. As we were driving down the freeway I noticed that something was flapping on the roof of the trailer. So I radioed my dad and told him to pull over. We discovered that the flapping was due to the rubber roof of the trailer that had pulled back from underneith the termination bar. So we tried to keep the roof down with wood blocks and a tie down. The tie down was not sufficient to keep the wood blocks down and so we ended up going to Nephi and having the trailer place do a temporary fix by adding another termination bar to keep the roof from peeling back.

Without further ado the pictures are here for viewing.