Back to "Normal Life"

It's been a while, but we've been busy since the last post. In mid September we ran the Brigham City, UT Peach Days 10K where Kelsi's pace was 1 min/mile faster than the half marathon the week prior and faster than the last time she did it a couple years ago. Yeah! (Rusty runs with Kelsi, but would have no problem running faster!) Here we are with Rusty's family after the race watching the parade.

All of Rusty's family were up in Brigham City (where Rusty's parents live) for the Peach Days weekend, so we took our niece and nephew, Hannah and Ethan, fishing in a nearby creek and caught this fish:

The kids were having a great time until Hannah's flip flop came off her foot and was swept downstream. She was SO upset! Her Aunt Alice had just given her 4-5 new pairs of shoes for school JUST before we went fishing, so Kelsi said something like the following to Hannah: Well, think of all the beautiful new shoes you just got. And Hannah started whailing, but I LOVE these shoes! They're so beautiful! And I want THESE ones! It was kind of hilarious to the adults. But luckily the creek turned into a pond just a short ways down and Rusty and Nate (Hannah's dad) were able to retrieve the flip flop. So everything ended up OK - though Ethan also tripped in the creek and got upset from being soaked. In the end, they decided that they weren't interested in fishing again until they are bigger. "Maybe in 2 or 5 years."

A couple weeks later we went to St. George with Rusty's friend, Aaron, and his girlfriend, Jessica, where we went rock climbing then to Zions for some spectacular canyoneering. We had to rappel down 5 or so big drops. The last one was about 90 feet with about 80 feet just free hanging. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures since none of us had a waterproof camera and we had full submersed swims through pools of water at times.


A couple weeks after going to Saint George, we took our FJ on the Canyonlands White Rim trail. We should have also taken our mountain bikes as EVERYONE else on the trail was biking it. We did take a rapelling rope though and backed our FJ up to a drop about 60 feet, put the emergency brake on, then tied the rope to the hitch and did the drop which went to a place you could walk back. Rusty ascended back up the rope once using prusik knots with two ropes to inch his way back up by stepping on one then sliding the other up from his waist. Then he would put weight on the top rope and slide the bottom rope up and repeat. We also enjoyed sharing our rope with the camp next to us as one of the guys who'd never rappelled before gave it a go on our rigged up contraption. That was a lot of fun.

Here's a couple pictures along the trail:
Sheer drop off the the left of us:

The following picture is of Musselman Arch about a quarter of a way into the trail. You can walk across it, though it's quite narrow and a death drop if you tripped. I think we've heard insane stories of people riding their mountain bikes across the arch, though, we think it's officially not allowed. That's not something we would do! Even walking across it gives Kelsi the eeby jeebies! We decided to post a picture from almost exactly two years ago when we did this trail with Rusty's friends, Russell and Emily, since we could both be in that picture:

The following is Rusty's rigged up rappel off the back of our FJ:

Since the trend of this blog seems to be reporting every other weekend, two weeks after the Canyonlands trip, we enjoyed Halloween by getting our first dental check-up in a year and a half by Rusty's friend, Benji, in Brigham City (no cavities for either of us!) followed by a family Halloween party where we dressed up as a cowboy and indian.



Of course our nieces & nephews & friends kids were also all adorable, but we'll let you look at their blogs & facebook pictures. A couple of our favorites that we saw were a 3 year old ghostbuster and a 3 year old fairy including matching shoes:

Louise's daughter, Aaliyah

Nephew, Isaak

As far as "normal life" goes, Rusty's still working for the law firm and Kelsi's still looking for a job! Crazy market!