Farming Fillmores: CAMPING FILLMORES

A lot has happened since our last post, and there is WAY too much to tell, so we are just going to show you a few pictures, which will be worth at least 1,000 words.

Lets start with April Fools Day. I had some old socks, so I made some mice which I placed in strategic places. Bruce discovered that chocolate sprinkles look a lot like mouse poop.

Someone donated a wonderful fridge, which I snatched up right away. It is one of my favorite features in this house. I'm just trying to figure out how it will fit in my truck if I sneak it back to Utah. Actually I'm waiting for my old fridge at home to "die", so I can get one of these. So far the old fridge has a "sick" ice maker....that's a start.

At the end of April it started warming up after a harsh winter. But after a wonderful warm week .....

It snowed again...nothing serious...It melted right away, but the next day we had some hail, which looked a lot like manna from heaven. (Of course I know exactly what manna looks like....I've read the Bible!)

So being Biblical, I went out and gathered the manna for my husband....but he wasn't fooled.

With Girls Camp right around the corner we put our work schedule in hyper-speed. We got the mold remediated in the kitchen and dining hall, then painted the whole building, with the help of others, including our son-in-law Jason Francis and his daughter Paige.

Of course there were leaky faucets, toilets and water heaters to fix in many areas of the camp as well as electrical issues, which Bruce handles so well. And by state law, a door had to be installed in the nurses cabin to separate the isolation room. Because the walls in this 1946 vintage cabin were so thin a commercial pre-hung door wouldn't work, so Bruce built his own door. It still needs a door knob and a coat of stain, but it's up and legal and fits the vintage decor.

I had already been working on making the latrines compliant with state regulations, but I needed help with this one....see if you can spot the problem with it.

(Not so private. ) Bruce stepped in to fix it.

On all the other latrines I just added paint, privacy curtains, and cute pictures that I clip to the walls everyday to give the girls something to think about while in the facility.

Here are some samples....there are lots more

Bruce was the mastermind in turning a second bathroom in the dining hall into a walk-in freezer.

It was a long, drawn out process, but badly needed for the camp.

Another task was getting all the activities set up and in place, including a dock on the lake, an archery range, a temporary zip-line, rifle range, hatchet throwing range and hiking trails.

The first actual week of camp I had a little "incident" with the side-by-side which I drive around. I forgot to apply the brake when I parked and the vehicle went on a little adventure of it's own. This is the hole it went down in. It crashed into a tree, denting the tailgate, which Bruce pounded out. He also pulled the Kabota back to safety.

Plentiful rain has caused some of our roads to turn to mud, causing many cars and trucks to get stuck if the drivers don't heed our warnings. Most require the tractor to pull them out, but one truck sat for a week waiting for the mud to dry out enough to get gravel down to it. A tractor tire also took a beating.

Some of these roads are pretty scary to drive on even with a side-by-side. This road is over a dam breast so it falls off into a lake on one side, and down a steep hill on the other. Yet, it is a main road to get from one end of camp to the other. The camp and roads have been neglected for over 30 years, so there is still much work to be done, with a bit of time and money.

When the rain gets very heavy, then Bear Creek overflows over the only bridge leading to the dining hall and camp sites. One day Bruce was on the north side of the bridge where the dining hall is and I was on the south side, where our house is. A group of campers had left a few hours earlier, so I told him (on the walkie-talkie) that there were still some ice cream sandwiches in the freezer that he could eat for dinner, and I hoped that he could make it home by the next day for church. It took about two hours for the water to calm down enough for him to get the truck over.

The heavy rain has also been eroding our activity field where the archery, hatchet and rifle ranges are. In this storm we lost about 10 feet of the field to the raging creek. When the water is down it looks pretty innocent.

On a lighter note, one daughter and three of our granddaughters came to camp on two consecutive weeks.

The first week of camp Stephanie came with her daughters, Praise and Delight (Stephanie is in the yellow boots)

The following week Paige came with her Dad, Jason. How fun is that!

We have had a few excursions away from camp. In May our grandson Garren married Katy in the Payson Utah Temple.

Then in June we went to the Indianapolis Temple with our grandson James who will soon be leaving on a mission. Stephanie drove over from Kentucky to join us for the occasion.

Our latest big adventure was another trip to Utah for the wedding of our granddaughter Annmarie, and then to a family reunion at Bear Lake. Annmarie married Colton in the Logan Temple. The reception was held in a hanger at the Logan airport, and featured Colton's plane as part of the decorations.

Here are a few random Bear Lake shots. Bruce and I were celebrating our 50th year Anniversary. Between all 68 of us, we took hundreds of pictures, including a big group picture, but this is just a taste of the wonderful time we had with our amazing children, their spouses and our grandchildren.