Palo Duro Canyon

On April 8, some friends from work invited us to go to Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo, Texas. We were thrilled to have a change of pace and get our camping gear out for the first time since moving to Texas. Last year was mostly spent helping Blake get better—I’m happy to report he is doing extremely well!! The drive to Palo Duro took us about 1.5 hours—the bad part—our air conditioner had broken a couple of days before!! We managed to survive though. The girls LOVED our tent and thought it was so cool!! I brought hot dogs and cut up veggies for dinner. Lanaea devoured it up—as you can see she didn’t stay clean very long LOL!! We spent the rest of the evening calming Mylee down because she was scared of our friend’s dog, going on a short hike and enjoying the experience of camping. Lanaea was probably the most fun to watch. She handled camping so much better and flawlessly then I ever expected her to. She was lovin’ life!! She enjoyed playing in the dirt and pointing out all the ants to us. Nighttime wasn’t as seamless as I would have hoped because Lanaea got cold and ended up sleeping with me through the night which meant little to no sleep for me. Kelsey and Mylee did great and slept the night through.




The next day we went on a hike with all the kids. Once Mylee learned to tell the dog to “stay”, we enjoyed our hike without her crying chorus. Kelsey LOVED it and had to be in front leading the way the whole time. It’s funny because I remember doing that as a child. When we returned back to camp, Blake and his friend Joe went Mtn. biking and me and Mandi when down to a little creek to play in the water with our kids. She has two little girls around Mylee and Lanaea’s age. They had a lot of fun together—it got pretty toasty though. Just when we returned to camp and had finished making sandwiches for lunch the boys showed up—perfect timing!! The Bergman’s were going to stay another night, but it had gotten really toasty and the wind had started to pick up so we helped them pack up their camp and we all left for home together.

We thought the drive to camp was bad, the drive was 10 times worse going back when we had been in the heat of the day with no relief from our car air conditioner. We ended up stopping at a gas station to get the girls icee’s to cool off. Then they eventually got cool enough to fall asleep. Sweet little girls! After our trip, Blake got all the supplies he needed to fix our AC. He ended up replacing our compressor and re-doing the whole AC system. He was so proud that he had figured out how to fix it. Our mechanic had quoted us at least $1,000 and we didn’t pay nearly that much for Blake to fix it himself.