Christmas Tree Adventure

Our Christmas tree hunting is always a fun tradition. It's typical, Mat does the hard work, the kids snack and play in and around the car and I watch and help pull the Christmas tree into the trailer when it finally falls. Things were going smoothly in the land of Co-op until it was time to climb out of the valley and go home.......



It had recently snowed and the sun was now shining on the land, which made the earth marshy and squishy.  We had three options to climb out of the valley.  Our first one had a tree blocking our path and it forced us to back down the trailer (not an easy task). The second, we made it up ten yards before peeling out. The 3rd, we tried several times to make it up the first hill with our engine burning only to realize if we couldn't make it up this one, the second hill was much steeper.  We were out of options, unless we decided to cut down the tree blocking path, which we didn't have a chain saw.  How unprepared we were! No chain saw and no winch tool.  We did have our goldfish crackers, which the kids were bickering about now.  I not so quietly turned around and said, "Kids, we are in a desperate situation right now and I don't want to hear about crackers or how bored you are.  You need to start praying that we get home tonight! So, pray!" With that, the kids silenced themselves and began to pray. Gretchen even climbed a tree to get closer to God. I didn't realize that until she called my name from up above.



We came to the conclusion that we were going to have to hand saw that tree blocking our path.  As we got the 1st tree cleared, we walked over the hill to find that 5 more trees had fallen across the road.  I tried to offer to help Mat to cut, but I could not get a rhythm going to even make a line cut in the tree. Mat ended up being our strong man and hero by sawing away all 6 trees.  It was nearing 4pm when we got out. We were passing the mighty fish-stocked lake of the Hoosier. It was that time of day where the rainbow trout start to bite and give you a ride.  Knowing we had a long ride home to Salt Lake, we just had to cast our poles in.









We then had to clean them---Quite the process





We were able to dissect the brain.