Summercamps before High School

Hey everyone, sorry for not having posted in pretty much forever. I had quite a bit of stuff to do this summer and now I just started High School two weeks ago. Over the summer I went to two summer camps and a missions trip to Arizona. The first camp I went to was a house boats trip at Lake Shasta with one of my church high school groups. We did ski runs every day so I got to go WakeBoarding!!!!!!!! I love going wake boarding I am pretty good at it and it's so fun!!

Here are some other pictures from the trip:

It was a great trip and I made one really good friend. Her name is Katie. For some reason I didnt get any pictures of her while we were there, which made me really frustrated cuz I dont see her that much anymore.

The second camp was with my other church high school group and we went up to Hume Lake. It was so cool. One of the days there, it was Super Spirit Day!!! We had to dress up according to the theme, which was USA. What we did was we had me dress up as President Obama and all the other guys in our group like the Secret Service. We pretty much won the competition and we got full spirit points for that day.

It was the coolest day by far up there. I also made another really good friend up there. Her name is Aley. Unfortunately I got a total of two pictures at Hume because I forgot to charge the camera battery after I got back from Houseboats.

Next I went on a missions trip to the Navajo reservation in Arizona. My team was from the same church high school group that went to Hume. It was such a great experience and now I get to go to Jamaica next year to do the same thing. Here are some pictures:

The Painted Desert was full of different colors of sand and stone.

Amazing view of The Grand Canyon.

Leah and my best friend Gavin. (Gavin tried to make it look like he was jumping off into the Grand Canyon).

This is what I found when we walked into our Hotel room.

Elk just outside of the Grand Canyon.

Our group at the Painted Desert.

Me at the Painted Desert.

My friend Sam at the Painted Desert.

Being able to do all these things was really cool. I cant wait to do more next summer!!!!

See you all next time.

YOSEMITE

Over spring break, I went up to Northern California. During that time I went to Yosemite. Although Yosemite might not be the most exotic of places, it was still really cool and beautiful. The mountains were huge. I was awestruck and I felt so small when I looked up at them. Especially half dome; it was so tall and I felt so useless looking up at it. 

The waterfalls are really cool too. There were several different ones. Some were really small, and others were huge. Yosemite Falls was either the biggest or one of them. It had three parts to it, the upper, the middle and the lower.

The biggest one was the upper, the smallest one was the middle, and the medium-sized one was the lower. The nature there was one of the things that makes you say, "how in the world did God make all of this in just anew days?"

We went on a couple little hikes and we took a bus tour around the park. Our guide was great. He knew what he was talking about and used what he knew to make the tour more interesting. 

The lodge we stayed at was called Yosemite Lodge. It was a pretty big place. They even had a place where you could rent bikes. I rented a bike and rode it around for a while we went to go watch people rock climb up the cliffs. While I was riding my bike it started to snow. That was the first time I was ever in a place where it was snowing for more than an hour. It didn't stay on the ground though, the weather was not cold enough for that.

One of the nights, we went out to dinner at the Ahwanee Hotel. The food was really good and the view was amazing, especially since it was snowing. We wanted to stay there but it cost too much so we didn't. The hotel itself is like a hundred years old.

Here are some of the pictures we took while we were there.

 Thats it for now. I will be posting later this month or early in the next.

The Egyptian Way!!!

Over winter break I went to a place where people don't normally go for an everyday vacation. I went to Egypt and Jordan. We stayed there for two weeks and even stayed for Christmas. It was kind of different but it was still really cool to do.

     So the Places we went were: Cairo, Abu Simbel, Aswan, A Cruise on the Nile, where we stopped at several places along the way; and Luxor, which had a lot of places to go to also. Today I am going to talk about Cairo.

 YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

     Cairo, in case you didn't know is the Capitol of Egypt. It is rather large, but it is not like the big cities we have in the U.S. One of the coolest and most interesting things about Cairo is that the traffic is so crazy and the pedestrians just walk right through like there is nothing to it. But of course the coolest part of Cairo is Giza. Where's that? That is where the Pyramids are. The biggest things in the whole world in the Ancient Days, the things that were so incredibly built that people thought aliens came down and built them, the massive structures that made scientists believe that maybe the Egyptians had technology almost as advanced as ours... Yes those Pyramids!!!! They are one of the coolest things you will ever see in your life. And they are one of the few remaining ancient wonders of the world. I really thought they were cool.  We got to ride a camel by the pyramids too. My camels name was Charlie. He was a cool camel.

He liked too eat out of my hand. By the way this was the other camel named charlie, it wasnt my camel this was my camel.

 Also in Cairo, actually right outside of Cairo, there was the Step Pyramid, the very first pyramid built by the father of the one who built the Great Pyramid. It was really cool, but not even close to as big as the other 3 pyramids were. Over by that pyramid I got to ride my horse, Amira; which means princess.

Isn't she a peerrrrrrtyyyy one?

 Oh how could I forget to mention the most important part of our trip to Cairo... Our guide!!! Ahmed!!!!!!!

Best Guide Ever!!!!

We also went to the Museum in Cairo. The coolest thing there was that it had a whole section on King Tutankhamen. Way cool!!!

The museum is in Tahrir Square, which is where all of the protests have been and it is also where the revolution started.

This is a burned out government building right next to the museum. 

Although there had been problems in Cairo, we felt completely safe and we had no problems with protestors or anything like that.

See ya'll later when I talk about the rest of my Egyptrip.

"Amusement Rides" in Egypt and Jordan

This year we had an unusual Christmas vacation. We went to Egypt and Jordan. It was really cool and it was a very different experience. I got to see a lot of the things I studied in the 6th grade and it just so happened that Egypt was my favorite part of that class.

Along with the interesting things, there were some interesting "amusement rides."

The amusement rides were Horses, Donkeys, and Camels. Throughout the trip I rode 3 horses, a camel, and a donkey. I got to try all of them and each one was different.

This was in the wide open desert where the pyramids are.  Psych! They are in Cairo. We saw the camels while we were at the pyramids and decided to ride them. Gramma's camel was Moses; mine was Charlie and papa's was Whiskey.

This was at the Step Pyramid. The horses name was Amira which means Princess.

This was Hoda. The horse I had in the Nubian village across from Luxor. I rode this horse while papa and gramma went to the Luxor Museum.

This was the horse that I had in Petra. Gramma fell off her horse here and it looked really funny. I don't remember this horses name. We rode the horses to the Sig.

This was the majestic donkey known as Aususs, which was the father of the mules that my Grandparents and our guide rode. We rode them to the Bedouin village out in the middle of the desert.

I will be writing more about Egypt in the coming weeks. And that's a PROMISE!!!!1