Man... I didn't get home until 11:15! Way too tired to even fire up the computer.. but now that I'm at work and we just at a major circut breaker failure and all the systems are down I've got some time :-D
Major thanks to Shay, Adam and I think wolfman (don't know your real name, man!) for getting my spacers in Thursday night. Also, thanks to Gerry, Fred and Chuck for allowing Jay, tracy and myself to squat in on thier campsite... we has six tents plus a screen tent.
I think I was still the lowest grand there. For some reason I was dubbed the tailgunner and luckily I didn't get left behind
For the first two hours of the stock trail Friday my wife was hyper-ventilating continuously. Aftre a while she got numb (and the trails got a little easier.) The boys riding in the back were not as thrilled about the whole thing as I would have hoped but they had a good time. They were coloring and reading and stuff while being tossed back and forth. At one point the older one complained that I messed up his drawing
I only went out with my Jeep on Friday but I feel good about it.. didn't get stuck enough to need a strap... just had to back up and try again a couple of times. I accomplished my main goal for the weekend which was to not loose any mudflaps
Saturday morning I stayed at the campsite with my wife and two boys, cooked breakfast and relaxed a little. Do you have any idea how quiet that camp can be? Right after lunch the advanced guys came back to camp and picked me up and we went trail exploring. There were five jeeps each with two people. Four of the five shotgunners were from our campsite, the fifth was Deanna.... WHAT AN EXPERIENCE! It's incredible to see what a grand can really do. We tried two trails and had to turn back around on both of them. The first one we got a ways up the hill when a large group of wranglers and such came down the other way informing us that we were going the wrong way... so we turned around and headed to the 8 trail Tracy mentioned above. We were just getting going on it and Adam commented that this trail was way more boring than the one they had run in the morning... then we turned the corner and started going up a creek bed. At one point I looked up and saw this big stump sticking up about two feet and I couldn't see any way around it. I got a little nervous and wanted to say something to the effect of "There is no f***ing way you are going to get past that!" but all I could utter was.. "look at that stump" .. Adam says: ".. yeah.. " and proceded to just drive right over it. I just couldn't believe it! Then Adam says.. "OK, now this is getting fun!" And then there was that log/rock thing that Tracy mentioned.. I've got some good video of Clay and Trace playing on that thing that I'll post as soon as I can. Looking farther up the trail there was a point where the whole creek bed was washed out with trees lying accross 20 feet high or so. The trail proceded to go around that mess by climbing the side up a slope that must have been at least 60 degrees and about 75 feet high... then it came down again on the other side of the log jam back into the creek. It was getting on to about 3 pm and if we had tried that we would've still been out past sundown so we turned around and went back to camp for some cold ones
Thanks to Gerry and Adam for helping me re-attach my front sway bar Sunday morning.
This was my first slam and the first opportunity to meet almost all of you. It was so great to finally put faces with names. You guys (and gals) are all a cut above the rest.
