Memorial Weekend Fun

Our ritual the last few years is to attend our Sunday School class retreat at Glorieta, NM over Memorial Day weekend. The kids always have a wonderful time, and it's nice to relax with our friends. This year, I was in charge of reserving the group, so it was a little more stressful than most years. However, things went off well, with the exception of the reservation desk messing up MY reservation. I'm only the one booking the whole thing....why on earth would I want to stay in an entirely different part of the conference center? But, after straightening out that "little" problem, we had a great weekend.
We arrived on Saturday and the kids promptly wanted to go for a hike. We started up the Glorieta Lookout trail with some friends, but Garrett started feeling sick, so we ended up heading back before we got to "lookout". After a campfire and several roasted marshmallows, he felt a little better, and we all collapsed into bed.
Sunday, Garrett woke up ready to go fishing! (Forget that there are only goldfish in the lake...he was convinced we could get something, cook it, and eat it. Yum...) Since apparently our children were the only ones in the group who felt the need to rise with the sun, Dave and I headed out to the lake before 7:00 am to let them play. Garrett casted to his heart's content with his trusty Scooby-Doo fishing pole, while Paige made mud pies on the shore. Garrett especially enjoyed fishing from the "deck" -we couldn't get him to call it a "dock" no matter how hard we tried!
After a worship service with the group, the kids headed back down to the lake again for another shot. The best we did was when Garrett used his hands to catch a minnow that had swum too far up into the shallows. After yelling "Hey Mom! I caught one!" he promptly dropped it into the sand, freaked out by its flailing fins. We rescued it and returned it to the water to live another day.
In the afternoon, I decided to brave the zipline along with some of my friends. We suited up in harnesses, helmets, and ropes and climbed the hill to the zipline tower. They cheerfully told us that it was a 120 foot vertical drop, but "not to worry because you're not more than 20 feet off the ground at any given time." Honestly, the scariest part was climbing the ladder onto the tower while holding a rope and the zipline contraption around my neck. After that, we got to fly down the hill at an amazing rate of speed. Poor Dave was given the task of attempting to take my picture as I zipped past him...he did a pretty good job, considering. It's a good thing the climb to the top was difficult, or I may have been in danger of becoming an adrenaline junkie.
After my bit of fun, the boys headed off and played paintball for the afternoon. We finished off the day with a game of volleyball, and round of miniature golf, and several more marshmallows around the fire.
Monday dawned and we headed back to reality, after one last trip around the lake on the paddleboat. All in all, it was a fabulous weekend, and we were a little sad to be headed home. God has given us some wonderful friends, and we love spending time with them! Now we are trying to settle into a summer schedule and figure out how to celebrate our 11th anniversary this weekend! Enjoy our pictures of our trip.

Glorieta 2008