An Oasis in the desert...

This weekend we went on a camping trip to a place outside of town (well, a ways out of town) in the middle of the desert. Here is the view from the parking lot. It's a true oasis in the Nevada desert with a natural warm spring that has been made into two swimming pools. It used to be owned by Howard Hughes but now belongs to my church who has improved the springs into pools. There is camping and swimming and it's surrounded by palm trees. Beautiful. We had a great time and came back a little burned. All our girls love the water. LOVE.

Ashley was swimming really well and doing all sorts of stunts. There are two 'cliffs' that you can jump from and she was braver then me. There was also a water slide (click the link for a video) and all the girls went down that over and over (well, except Cori). Megan is almost swimming. She's so close. There was an area that was shallow enough for Megan to walk in and she kept practicing swimming (she's in the back in the blue suit) under the rope. Annika LOVES the water and has no fear. She went down the slide about 20 times in a row by herself. The problem is that she doesn't realize that she doesn't know how to swim. She'd take off her floaties and not be able to figure out why she'd sink. Even Cori was having a blast in the water. She liked climbing up and down the steps in and out of the water.

We've not gone camping as a family in at least two years. Last summer was just so busy and stressful with Cori being a newborn and selling our house and moving that we never went anywhere. The girls really enjoyed the camping too. We were worried that it was going to be a really hot night- but the weather was perfect. They actually all slept quite well considering how many marshmellows and how much chocolate they ate.

It was nice to just spend the time together hanging out. My mom and sister Jessica came up on Friday night and swam with us. Jessica had to catch her plane back to Boston at midnight though so they didn't spend the night.