bootie!

So this last weekend the interns took a trip to the mountains.  On saturday we went rafting again because Will got us a great deal.  We don't have rafting pictures yet because no one wanted to bring their cameras and get them wet, except for Danna but it's not digital, so it will be a while till I get that picture.  It was the first picture that had all the interns in it.  It's so hard to get all 9 of us in the same place, except at work.  Hmm, we should take more pictures at work.  Anyway, when we went rafting, I saw people from Hawaii, not only from Hawaii, but from Pearl City.  That was soooooo weird.  They were in the rafts next to us, and while we were going down the river, this girl calls out "are you Michelle?".  I'm thinking, "what the heck?".  Turns out it was someone I hadn't seen in like 10 years, but she remembered me.  That was soooooo weird.  Anyway, so we rafted, and it was really fun, but we got pretty wet this time because we had a lot of water fights going down the river.  Dave and HoJun are such trouble makers.  Lisa says "It's true".

Then we all had lunch at Subway and then went shopping for camping food.  Then we headed to our camp site at Kite Lake.  Driving there, we could see the top of the mountain we would be climbing, Mt. Democrat.  Kite Lake was beautiful, and at about 12000 ft. elevation.  There were no trees at our campsite because it was above the treeline.  It was too high for trees to grow.  Right as we got to our campsite, it started snowing.  I started feeling miserable, I felt like I was just hit with all these negative thoughts and I wanted to cry.  I couldn't stop thinking that it would be freezing and I'd have to sleep on the hard ground and not get to shower.   Everyone else was so excited about being out there, and getting to camp.  I took some time and prayed.  That made me feel a lot better.  I went and washed my face in the lake and felt ready for anything :).  Ivan and Adam went fly fishing.  Everyone helped set up camp.  It was cool because our camp site was right next to the lake.  We forgot to buy water before we headed up there, so we filtered lake water to drink.  Lisa and I were the water-filterers.   Clouds came in (oh, and that's the outhouse by the way).  It was crazy that we were so high up that we were in the clouds.  Anyway, it was freezing.  Okay, now it's time to explain the title of the blog entry.  It all started when we were rafting because we got to rent booties to wear on our feet, and me and Lisa would joke about our bootie-tans.  Then as we were riding the bus back, we were joking about playing "big bootie".  Ivan had some experience with "big bootie", and Danna got all excited about it.  I guess from all that bootie talk, Jenni started singing "Shake your bootie", you know, the old one that goes "shake shake shake, shake shake shake, shake your bootie".  Okay, so it was freezing at the campsite and guess what our method of staying warm was . . . yup, you guessed it.  We even made a "shake your bootie" video,  but it didn't come out very well because it was dark by that time.  Dave didn't really get into the bootie-shaking although he had to have been really cold.  It has become our theme song I think.  Kinda weird, but lots of fun.  We had a remake of the "shake your bootie" video last night.  I wish I could attach videos.  We're pretty funny to watch.  Anyway, got side-tracked there. 

We cooked some "Damn good chili".  Hey, I'm just quoting the package.  It was pretty good.  I think it's also because we were camping.  Everything tastes better when you're camping.  We then tried to make smores, but we only had this old package of marshmallows which had turned into one giant marshmallow.  It was a little difficult to make smores out of it, but we had fun trying.  We kinda mooched off the fire that our neighbors made.  Ooh, I forgot, Ivan caught a fish and we cooked it.  It was the first trout I've ever tasted.  It was sooooooo good.  We decided to turn in pretty early because were gonna start hiking early the next morning.  We wanted to have a short worship time before we went to bed though, so we all piled into a tent and Ivan played a little backpacking guitar and we sang in the dark.  It was great.  Here is a picture of us in the tent about to worship.  When Adam took this picture, it was very dark and he couldn't see through the viewfinder, but he did a good job anyway.  Go Adam!

Then it was time to go to bed, so we all went to our tents.  The girls got all comfortable and were about to sleep when we heard someone yelling and splashing in the lake.  Ivan had jumped in the lake.  He is insane.  It was soooooooo cold.  He thought it would be a good time to go for a swim.  We've nicknamed him "the bear" or "the polar bear" and you can probably understand why.  Anyway, the night wasn't too restful for a lot of us.  It was cold and the tents got a little wet.  Even with the tons of extra sleeping bags we had, it was hard to keep warm.  When we woke up in the morning, everything was covered in frost.  I think this had to be the coldest place I've been in for the longest period of time.  Dave thinks it was under 20 degrees that morning.  Crazy.  We cooked some bacon, made some trail mix, pb and j sandwiches, and bagels and cream cheese to take with us, and we started off at about 6:30 for the top of the mountain.

To be continued . . .