Trek

Ready for a super long post about trek? Well, here it goes. Emilee ended up spending the night so her mom wouldn't have to drive her out to FG at 5 am. Emilee and I said that we would go to bed and get lots of sleep. Guess what? With girls that doesn't happen. We stayed up until 10:30ish. And then I woke up at 3 am. Yeah. I know. Super bad decision. Anyways... I took the first shower and tried my hardest to take everyone's hot water... :) It was so hard getting out of the shower thinking that it was my last shower for a week. I was so tempted to stay in there forever. When we got to the stake center to load on the buses at 5:30 am we got put into companies. I was in the Willie company. Emma and Adam were in my company but besides that I didn't really know anyone. We loaded buses by company which was about to assure me that I sat by someone I totally didn't know for 4 hours. But heaven intervened and we didn't have room in our bus for everyone in my company so 6 or 7 lucky girls got to go on the overflow bus. With 4 or 5 adults. And they weren't crappy school buses. They were NICE! And we had it all to ourselves. And I got to sit by Emma. Great way to start trek, if you ask me. 

{loading our handcart... and I'm totally helping... not talking to Caden}

When we got to Bing Canyon a 4-5 hours later we got put into our families. Another thing I was really freaked out about. I was really scared that I wouldn't know anyone in my family and that they would all be really weird or mean or annoying. Can you tell how worried I was? I had an amazing Ma and Pa and 8 amazing siblings (4 brothers and 4 sisters). I was actually really excited about having brothers and older sisters. Being the oldest of 6 girls I don't really get the older sibling experience and older sisters are a lot different than younger ones. I got plenty of teasing from Mike and Sean and it was fun to be able to talk about everything with my sisters. And remember I didn't know any of my family before trek. Oh, that's a lie. I knew Sean. He's my friend's brother. But that doesn't count. BTW if you are looking for me in the pictures I'm in all orange in most of them...

Apparently the first day the weather dropped 30 degrees and we didn't have to start off in total heat, which was really nice since we were kind of from Oregon and it had just stopped raining here. We all started off happy. I started off pushing from the back with Josalyn, which is the easiest thing besides walking. The first day we had a lot of dehydration problems. But only Josalyn and Megan had to stop from my family. And we got them back soon after. The first day we went up this really steep hill. It wasn't the hardest hill we went on during trek, but it was definitely the steepest. We had 2 people on each handcart to steer the handcart and then all the other people were up on the top of the hill pulling them up. That was our first experience helping everyone out and we thought that the hill was going to be the hardest part of trek (not true at all).

Due to all of our dehydration problems on the first day we did all of our trekking in the morning on the second day. It wasn't as hard as the first day because we didn't have a huge hill. We ended up not taking that long to get from our camp to where we would be camping that night so we had lots of free time that we got to spend with all of our friends, which I did since I really didn't know anyone from my family yet. It got really hot and some people broke out in water fights, which we apparently weren't supposed to do because it was using up all of our water. That night we had a square dance, which was a blast. We were a little crowded but it was fun. In fact, it was one of the main reasons that I went to trek! One thing I learned from day 2: Mosquitoes can be HUGE!

 {Alex and me}

 {Harrison and me}

 {Me with Taylor}

 {I'm not in this one, but Sean is the one with the yellow bandana and Jacob has the red suspenders}

 {Oh.. and this is the hill I was telling you about from day 1}

 {All you see at trek... brown and more brown}

Day 3 was also pretty mild. They had an official washing hair day when we reached camp. I was glad for the chance, but didn't really mind since my wonderful Ma brought a portable shower. Jealous? It was great when it wasn't trying to blow over (happened once). I was so happy when I saw all the guys wanting to wash their hair too. That was another one of my fears: stinky guys. Day 3 was also when I really bonded with my family and got to know them better. It started out when we started telling more about ourselves and when the guys were trying to figure out the girls' crushes. I was the first girls whose crush they guessed successfully... and that's were the teasing started happening. The other bonding experience we had was when we were playing spin the bottle. Not the real game. It was with hugs because it needed to be trekified. Another thing that happened that was a really great experience, probably my first really spiritual experience, was when one of the girls had a really bad allergic reaction and had to be taken to base camp for a little. Most of my family was from the TV branch which is a spanish speaking branch in my stake. It was an amazing experience to see the closeness in their branch as they all prayed for her. And the most touching experience was when my Pa went out and was praying in the middle of nowhere for this girl for a while and to see him come back to her back from base camp and doing a lot better. 

 {Ma McLaughlin... one of the amazing Ma's in my company}

 {We were supposed to be whittling spoons out of wood and Preston had to be an overachiever and make a spoon, knife and fork out of a carrot}

Helpful hint: If you are in my family you probably don't want to take a nap while everyone is still awake. You might get facial hair drawn on you by Sean with the encouragement of the rest of us. And since we don't have mirrors on trek you would have to wait for a true friend to tell you. Which none of us apparently were. :)

{my family}

Day 4 was our last day of trekking and my favorite day. Every girl had the choice of doing the traditional women's pull. All the girls in my family did it. The young men all pulled some of our handcarts down this hill and then went back up to camp for a devotional. Us young women then had a devotional of our own about the importance of the priesthood and the guys. I really didn't take the devotional too seriously until after the women's pull. My family's girls joined with Emma's and we had a handcart. It did take more of us to pull the handcart, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. We were going pretty slowly and every once in a while Emma would say something about Channing Tatum that would make us have a boost of energy. :) The best part of the women's pull for me was when we were going up the last hill. We saw all of the young men waiting for us on the top of the hill and they were singing hymns. They weren't allowed to help us until we reached a certain point and my brothers later told me that that was one of the hardest things they had to do. Once we did get to that certain point though all of these young men came up and helped us. We seriously had to run to keep up with them.

Another option we had after the women's pull was whether or not our family was going to do Rocky Ridge. Rocky Ridge involved going up a rocky hill and getting part of your family pulled out so you could experience what it would be like to lose a family member like most of the pioneers did. When asked if our family would do it my Ma answered "of course, we will do it together." When we started Rocky Ridge my company was the last of the 5 to leave and my family was in the middle of the company. When we started President Richardson chose 3 of our family members to die. We lost 2 of our sisters and our Pa. After we finished Rocky Ridge we got them back. 

After Rocky Ridge we got delayed due to some medical problems in the companies ahead of us. While we were waiting for them we were drinking up our water (more on this later). When we finally started going again we had to go down this super sandy hill. After that hill, with still a lot more left to do, our company started running out of water. This was not planned. We started rationing out a couple inches each and at one point we were completely out. Then the company ahead of us started having some heat problems which delayed us even more. We sent ahead some of our boys to help them. Then it started getting really hard. I had been pulling all day with Mike and Megan and we were out of water and you could tell that we were dehydrated. My Pa decided that it wasn't good for us to pull anymore and kicked us off of pulling duty and told us to push "lightly". Yeah right. We were pushing pretty darn hard. Everyone in our company was tired and we were moving really slowly. Then all the sudden all these young men from the other companies started coming back to help us. When I started to see the guys from my ward coming back I started to cry and kept on crying for the next hour or so. When we reached "Zion" I was so happy. They had sprinklers and water and treats. It was heaven on earth. We had a testimony meeting that night and we also had another square dance. And thanks to Caleb, I learned how to swing! I stayed up really late that night talking to my family and I would have to say that Day 4 was definitely my most favorite day even though it was the hardest and everything that I loved about it was not planned. It was where I gained a major respect for the pioneers. 

 {Pa and Josalyn}

 {Mike, Sean, Pa, Ma, Josalyn}

It was great to be in Zion! Notice the green grass in this picture? My Pa was quite the joker and decided to play hair races with my brothers. Have you ever played that? It's a pretty fun game. If someone ever asks you to play I strongly recommend you do it. 

Just more beautiful, green, cool, amazing grass.

Remember how I went to girls' camp? Well we couldn't just let our 4th year sweater tradition go, so we got to have some special young women time where the 4th years got their sweaters. Emma got her's and she had a beautiful camp name. 

After our girls' campness the buses were supposed to be there. And they weren't. In fact they came 2 hours late. Brother Updike turned on music and I totally freaked out. You don't know how amazing Call Me Maybe is when all you have listened to for the last week is pioneer music. Then he must have really loved me because he started playing all of my favorite songs. We had a dance. It was amazing. 

The bus ride was pretty okay. Besides the fact that my bus broke down. An hour and a half from home. We split up between bus 2 and 5 and all had a lovely crammed ride home. And smelly. The bathrooms were stinking up the whole bus.

Part of the trekness was us trekking for a ancestor. We all had to choose someone and do some research on them. I decided to trek for my Aunt Becky who passed away in 2010 from sarcoma. She was my hero and I was very close to her. I definitely felt her presence during trek and I was thinking about her constantly. 

To cut it short... I'm glad I went on trek. I love my shower. And my bed. And I will definitely be going next trek. 

And we made it onto the Oregonian: 

http://www.oregonlive.com/forest-grove/index.ssf/2012/07/250_teens_from_forest_grove_st.html