Youth Conference

So my life for the last little while has been totally focused on Youth Conference. I stressed and stressed about it because I was the only YW leader going. Everyone else has nursing babies or kids with special needs. Luckily there ended up being 2 moms that came with us so that I was not alone!

We had THE BEST time!!! I really love my calling and I really love all the girls in my ward. This was also a great chance to get to know the young men...and I must say I was thoroughly impressed!

I'll try not to be too long and annoying with details, but here it goes.

We left on Thursday morning and went to the Bountiful Temple to do baptisms for the dead. It was a neat experience to be there with the girls - and for some of them it was even their first time! Then we headed up to Idaho to Lava Hot Springs to swim in the pool. It was so much fun! They have diving platforms that are Olympic regulation height, and if you are a minor, you have to have a permission slip filled out by a parent before you can jump off them! (That right there is a major warning to me that it's not a good idea to do it!) I caught a few pictures of the kids jumping, but this is one of our bishopric members!

After Lava we drove to Alpine Wyoming where we had reserved some campsites in a campground. When we finally got there at about 6:30-7:00pm we found out that there were already people in all of our campsites! After a tense scramble and search we found out the the campground had doubled booked most of their campsites! So, we weren't the only one's without a place to sleep that night! It was a big dilemma for the leaders to try to figure out what to do, but the kids were all laughing and having a great time. I didn't hear one person complain at all!

We ended up finding a much better and much cheaper (i.e. FREE) campsite about 1 mile up the road. This place was gorgeous! The pictures I took don't even do it justice. It was so isolated and peaceful and beautiful! Here is the view from my lonely 1-person tent.

The only issues with the campsite was no running water and no bathrooms! We were able to get by with no running water because we had tons and tons of bottled water...but the bathrooms for the young women were a different story. The girls toughed it out for the first night, and the next morning at 6:15am we had port-o-potties delivered to us in the middle of nowhere (thanks to our YW president's mad skills!) After that it was smooth sailing! I could have stayed there for a few more days...and that's saying a lot because I'm not a huge camper!

On Friday we went rafting on the Snake River...what a blast! The water was freezing, the rapids were great, and all the girls on my boat had a major crush on our guide! You can check us out on the river at http://snakeriver.elevationimaging.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?&category=692037 and https://www.snakeriverphotos.net/findphotos.asp?InfoID=43950

Here's the whole group before we got on the rafts. Friday evening was the big spiritual devotional by the bishopric, which was really great but much to complicated to explain here, followed by an amazing testimony meeting! I had a great time and loved every minute of it!