Memorial Day 2010

For Memorial Day, we made the day trip up to Prescott Valley, AZ to see our good friends, the Polls.  They recently moved to Prescot Valley from MN, so it was awesome to see them and hang out like we used to on Memorial Day.  About a ten minute drive away from their house there is a state park that we went to.  We ate lunch, then went on a hike.  Unfortunately, we went the round about way to get to this amazingly deserted beach.  The beach was only about 50 yards from where we ate our lunch, and we just didn't see it.  We chose to walk the other direction and we walked all the way around the lake, which ended at the beach.  And it was a great reward for all of that hiking.

The entire time we were on the beach reminded me of our Memorial Days back in Minnesota.  We'd go to a state park, eat lunch, then go play at the beach ... and yes, we did this with the Polls there as well, except we also had about 5 other families at our little shindig.

There are some slight differences between this lake and the one we'd go to back home in Minnesota.  At this lake there was a severe lack of sunfish to nibble on the boys' (and mens') exposed nipples, no weeds to swim around in, and ... oh, yeah, we weren't supposed to swim in this lake.  But, that didn't stop our children from "wading" in the water and "whoops-did-I-trip-over-the-nonexisitant-weeds" accidentally fall into the water.  Eliza perfected the full body submersion act of innocence. 

Another difference between this lake and the one we'd gone to on previous Memorial Days is the solitude.  We were the only ones on this particular part of the beach.  It's interesting to me that we can live in a place that is populated almost by four times (or more) the number of people we had back in our little spot of Minnesota, and yet there we had a hard time finding a place on the beach large enough for our group.

At one point there was a gust of wind and Jon started packing up.  It kind of became the joke that the wind scared Jon into leaving ... the rest of us were just sitting around watching the children play, or dry off; we weren't feeling the rush to move on to the next activity.  And, it was so fantastic to just sit and relax in nature with some of our favorite people.  It made for a very tired, but relaxing day.  One that our family has cherished and cannot wait to repeat.

*The crux of being the photographer is that I am not in any of the pictures.  But, the fact that there are pictures, proves that I was there, right?  I ended up taking over 100 pictures just at the beach, and scaled that down to a few, but way too many to post here.  So, if you're interested in seeing more pictures, click here.