So... this weekend was supposed to be a YSA camp out, but that got cancelled so Erin organized a pseudo camp-out that consisted of his family, his brother Nathan and two children, Ramona and her family, and 17 of us BYU girls. We had a blast! most of these pictures are just scenery because it was so beautiful! There are more pictures of me on the trip on FB though. Ramona drove the van that I was in on the way up, she doesn't even like driving in the states. This trip took us through some very windy, narrow roads and cliffs overlooking the ocean. She was driving an 11 passenger, manual, diesel van. It was quite terrifying. Once we got there things were awesome though.

Take a good look at these muscles. They are native to New Zealand and worth a lot of money apparently. We had the once in a lifetime opportunity to harvest, prepare, and eat them. The preparation was the most exciting part, we had to gut and clean them, wash them and cut them into long strips to be put in a mincer. Then we ground them all up and added other things to cook them in. I had the job of cutting them up and I was hunched over the table for a long time. My back is still sore. It was really fun, and even though they didn't taste as great as Erin made them sound, I still enjoyed them.

These are booboos. They are everywhere and apparently people eat them. Erin and Nathan told us that when they go fishing this is what Erin "dives" for, so Sarah and I got a few for him.

This is me "diving" for booboos

we ate these, they are disgusting!

We went scuba diving for food in the tidal pools.

We set this net a couple times to catch fish. Unfortunately it didn't work because one of the sticks fell down and the net just kinda drifted around for a while. The second time we set it we came back to find that something had beat us to it, the fish we had caught were dead and some of them were skeletons.

I protested wearing this, but I was super glad I had it while we were snorkeling.

We spent all day Saturday on the beach, and we were almost the only people there! It was awesome! We had a few surfboards but the surf wasn't very good.

This is the campsite. we took up quite a bit of space. the first night we were there we stayed up till about 2 am singing around the lantern. It was so much fun! We got in trouble though, and we had to be quiet by 10 pm the next night. Erins cousin runs the camp and he told us we had some complaints. We received mixed messages though because a couple people told Ramona that they really enjoyed our singing

Micah, Brittany Babcock, and Sarah in the back of the van. Good times.

These pictures pretty much speak for themselves. They are from the car on the drive up to the campsite. The whole drive was really pretty but once we started driving along the coast it was breathtaking.

Science and Social Studies

This is our science teacher Ian Milne, he was pretty cool. We did a lot of super fun experiments in his class this past week. Classes go by super fast when you only have them for 6 days :) we watched things dissolve, made things blow up, made paper fly, sorted sand/salt/rice, took plants apart, played with cars, melted things, and made a suspension. My favorite thing we did was make rockets out of film canisters, alka seltzer, and water. Super fun.

This is Alexis, our social studies teacher. She was phenomenal! One of the best teachers I have ever had. She gave me a whole new perspective of what social studies teaching is all about, most of my teachers got it wrong.

horseback riding continued

This is the whole group that went, I think we overwhelmed the workers there, the four guides that went with us are on the left side of the picture. Only two of our group didn't come, Amanda was sick and Sarah decided to stay home to be responsible and work on a bunch of stuff. The rest of the pictures are the scenery that we rode through. If you haven't been jealous of what I have been doing so far you should be of this. It was the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. I was amazed the whole time we were riding through it.

This is a famous horse. He stared as Phillip in Narnia. There were actually several horses that were in the movie but this he was my favorite.