A Visit from Sam, Jack and Stori

Sam, Jack and Stori have been visiting with us for over a week now and we have had lots of fun. We did not take any photos until Friday evening when we lots of family over to celebrate Jack and Stori’s 10^th birthday. For the birthday dinner, the kids helped put together the menu. We had steak, grilled squash slabs, corn on the cob, salad and blue Jell-O. These are some of the photos at the birthday party.

Stori likes playing with Rocky and Rocky likes her and anyone else that will play with him.

Jack spends a lot of time with his new Legos.

Yesterday (Saturday) I took Sam and Jack to Almaden Lake Park. In addition to the typical playground for little children, they have one for ages 6-12 with some cool climbing structures that the older kids enjoyed. .

Sam and Jack were able to get the swings going pretty high.
Sam really enjoyed jumping out of the swing. Jack enjoyed it, but not as much as Sam

After we left the park, we went up into the mountains close by for a hike. The trail head is 8.5 miles from our house by road and 6 miles in a straight line. At the beginning of the trail, there is a sign warning about mountain lions and bobcats. The sign said that where there are dear and other animals to eat, there will be mountain lions. The first thing we say was 5 wild turkeys and then we say a deer. After seeing the photos and reading about mountain lions, Sam was whacking two rocks together. I asked him if it was to scare off the mountain lions. He said yes. I asked him if he saw "The Parent Trap" he said yes. I told him that it does not work. I told Sam and Jack that the best way to protect against mountain lions is to stay together in a group and do not go off on your own. They stayed within about 4 feet of me the rest of the hike, even when I was jogging. We saw a bobcat while driving home, but no mountain lion.

The next morning (today) is Easter. Here are the kids with Easter baskets and dressed for church.

After Church we fixed ham, cheesy potatoes, asparagus, carrots for dinner. For desert we had boysenberry pie and ice cream. The kids declined the pie and only had ice cream. Mark, Mom and I really enjoyed the pie and vanilla ice cream.

After dinner, we had an Easter egg hunt in the back yard. I believe the kids had a good time. They asked if they could do another Easter egg hunt a couple of hours later.

They have been gone from their Mom and Dad for 9 days now and they are ready to go home on Tuesday morning.

Joseph's Mission Photos - 2nd Batch

A couple of months ago Elder Joseph sent some photos home from Pohnpei. Some of you saw them while you were here for Christmas. A few weeks ago I finally posted these photos on Facebook. Some of you may not frequent facebook enough to have seen these, so I thought I should post them here so those that have not yet seen them will be able to see Elder Crapo in Action.

In the first batch of photos Joseph sent, there was a video of him chopping open a coconut with a machete. Now several months later, he has improved his machete skills considerably. It was interesting to note in a recent letter that a missionary was injured while chopping open a coconut.

With helps and suggestions from Becky and Katie, I figured out how to post the video to youtube and then insert in blog. Thanks.

Monterey with Sheri and Dallin

Mom and I took Sheri and Dallin to Monterrey on Saturday. It has been raining here for about two weeks and was still raining a little when we arrived in Monterey, but it cleared up later.

Since we were hungry, the first thing we did was go to the Fish Hopper restaurant. This is the same place Mom and I ate when we went in January. The waiter took a photo of the four of us at our table with the ocean view. Dallin was enjoying the bread while we waited for our food.

Mom and I both ordered the Macadamia crusted Halibut. It was amazingly good like last time. Sheri got the seafood platter with crab with a skewer of scallops and shrimp with rice. She looked like she was enjoying her food.

After we ate, we went to the Aquarium. Dallin and the rest of us enjoyed the exhibits such as the sea anemones.

Sheri and Dallin got to be in the aquarium. There was a tunnel that they crawled through to get to the other side.

Dallin really liked the star fish that were available to touch. There were bat rays that people could touch, but they were not getting close to the people while we were there.

Dallin discovered that he really likes chocolate chip cookies. He liked them so much that he even swallowed.

We stopped at Ghirardelli for Hot Fudge sundaes. I did not get a photo before we started eating, but they looked and tasted amazingly good. Here is Sheri finishing off the last of them.

After we got home and Dallin had his bath, he decided that he did not like the gate that kept him from going down the stairs, so he tried to go under. He got stuck, so we rescued him. He was more annoyed than upset about getting stuck.

We had a great day. It has been fun having Sheri and Dallin visit.

Uvas Canyon

On Saturday, February 12, Mom and I invited john and Becky to go for a hike in Uvas Canyon County Park. Uvas means grapes, but I did not see any grapes. There are lots of hiking trails to choose in the park. Since one of our hiking goals is to prepare to hike to the top of Half Dome, I picked one that had some good uphill hiking and also some nice scenery. Of course, there were geocaches along the way. Becky posted some great photos and recorded the Ten Commandments of Geocaching in California Crapos.

We hiked up the trail along the stream. Here is hiker Mom looking good. This was her first hike with her new Camelbak and trekking poles.

We came to this fun tree. Mom was the first to climb up on the tree.
We also found a few geocaches along the way. This is an ammo box cache that we found.

When we got back to the car, John and I decided to go look for one more geocache that was close to the car. It is called the Waterfall Cache for good reason. The cache was close to this waterfall.

The total hike was about 4 miles. We will be doing several other hikes with increasing difficulty to prepare for the big hike. And to answer Mom’s comment/question on Half Dome: Of course, there are geocaches to find while hiking up Half Dome. We found some of them in 2008, but most of them are virtual caches where you just log information without actually finding a container.

Baby Blessing

Before we started taking baby blessing pictures, this cute young man was talking to Grandma on the walki-talki.

We had various group photos.

The following photos were cropped from other photos in order to see how cute Charlotte is. Neil just came along for the ride.

Sabino Canyon

While in Arizona for Charlotte's blessing, we decided to go to Sabino Canyon on Saturday. Sabino Canyon is north of Tucson and is around 3000 feet elevation. There is a stream coming down the canyon but the low elevation still makes it somewhat desert like. There is an abundance of Saguaro cacti. There is a tram/shuttle that takes people 3.8 miles up the canyon an then returns. There are 9 stops along the way and the trams run every 30 minutes so you can ride or walk whatever portions you want. We needed two benches for our group.

Right next to the tram was a roadrunner. I did not see the cayote, but I am sure he was not too far away. The roadrunner did not seem to be very afraid of people.

We took the tram all the way to the end of the road at the back of the canyon and got off at stop 9.

At the back of the canyon, there is an alternate adventurous route down to stop 7. John, Becky, Neil and I decided to take the long trail (2 miles of trail to get to where it was less than a mile by road). This trail had some great views.

We stopped at the back of the canyon for this group shot of the four of us using the 10 second timer on our camera. Neil expertly pressed the buton and quickly made it to where we were just in time for the photo. Good job Neil.

We made it back down to the road and met up with the rest of the group. They were waiting for us where the road crossed the stream and where the stream formed lots of small pools. What happens when there are bodies of water and lots of rocks and kids under 100 years old arrive? The rocks get thrown in the water, of course. Neil is teaching the young ones how to find and throw rocks in the water.

John and Neil got on opposite sides of a 20 foot diameter pool and threw rocks in the water in order to splash each other. I did not see how wet Neil got, but John had some good splash marks on him.

We road the tram back down the canyon from stop 7.

After we got back to the cars, we drove a short distance to Coldstone for ice cream. Below, you can see blue ice cream (cotton candy flavor) going down the hatch.

After we got back to the house, we had amazingly good fettuccine alfredo for dinner. It was a really fun day.