Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Super Capacious Titanic Elephantine Economy-Sized Ward Activity

This past weekend was the "Super Capacious Titanic Elephantine Economy-Sized Ward Activity" and the following post will be describing the merrymaking that was had:

It all started for me at 6:00pm when I arrived at the A street chapel. We were instructed to meet there if we were going to be carpooling up to the place where the fun would take place. It was up at a cabin in Heber City owned by the one and only Brother Brown.

When I got to the Chapel to meet with the others who were ready and waiting to go, people were already taking pictures like crazy. You can tell by our faces that we were anxious to get going. We all loaded up the truck with our sleeping bags and pillows and after waiting about 20 minutes for the stragglers we set out on the 1.5 hour journey. I was one of the driver
s so I grabbed my three passengers and we took off for Heber City. 

The drive was filled with fun little activities that brought everyone in the car just a little bit closer to each other. 
We even played a game of "Name That Tune" with the winner going home with a whole dollar to spend on whatever and wherever they felt fit. The winner was the lovely Shelby Castleton, who was the first person to get 15 points (or something...I stopped counting) The other two passengers who sat in the back (Marliette and Bob) accumulated a whole point together, can we have a round of applause for the two musically ill-informed? J/K, I like them.

As we reached the parking area for the people who aren't important enough to park up at the actual cabin we (the four passengers of my car) were separated into two different cars and shuttled up. When we reached the cabin we were instructed to unload everything and go eat dinner. Now, dinner was very different than any other ward activity dinner that I'm sure anyone has ever had.
 The ward brought Cafe Rio to us. As we got to the buffet table, immediately it felt like we were in line at Cafe Rio, but this time the sneeze guard was gone and we were preparing our own chicken and pork salads. Yeah, it was that good. After dinner everyone dispersed and started to inhabit every possible room in this four story cabin to start playing and mingling and just having a gay old time. For the next several hours I spent time playing ping pong, foosball, wii, and a plethora of card games.It wasn't until about midnight that people started to get really tired. In fact, that was about the time that I pulled out two dollars and decided to get a group of people together to play another game of "Name That Tune" with the winner taking home a whole dollar to spend on whatever and wherever they felt fit. This time I was the singer belting out the tunes. After a few of songs were guessed I couldn't think of any more songs so I told the players that the next person to guess the next song would be declared as the winner. The winner of the dollar was the lovely Shelby Castleton, yet again. 


The other dollar was rewarded to the person that could get to 5 points first in a game I like to call "Who can guess closest to the record in the 2008 Guiness Book of World Records without going over." We went through several categories including biggest food items, tallest buildings, and all around weird crap. It was a really long game. In the event that every player would guess over the actual number I would get a point. I believe I had 3 points when someone reached 5. So I didn't get to keep the dollar, but that is okay. I actually don't even remember who it was that won, but that isn't that important, what is important is that we had fun.

A little earlier we also had a nice prayer meeting in the woods. We had a little make-shift fire that kept us all so warm. The bishop shared a few thoughts with us and ended by telling a  very convincing story that ended making half the people who were in attendance almost pee their pants while the other half just screamed like little girls. 

At 1:00am the boys in the ward were asked to go the a cabin just down the road to spend the night. Breakfast was at 9:00am. We had pancakes and other normal breakfast foods like eggs, and hash browns. It was quite good, really.

After breakfast we had a few hours for more fun time. A group gathered together down in the woody area that was used for the prayer meeting and organized a talent show that really just ended up having a girl named Francine show us her Karate moves. We even got a little clip to prove that nobody, including me, should mess with her:


The taller blonde girl in the video is Nicole, she is the only one who successfully took Francine to the ground. Anyways, after I got my trash kicked by Francine we decided to learn a dance that Marliette had learned at EFY. It was one of the gayest moments of my life.

After the dance dance revolution we went back up to the cabin to finish our morning with a game of Scum, which is a pretty fun card game.


We then cleaned up the cabin and headed back to Heber City for lunch at The Dairy Keen. It wasn't that good, so I won't take anymore time talking about it.

One of the best parts of this activity was the hike that we did up in Sundance. We took the lift up to the top of the mountain and started to hike towards Stewart Falls and then back down to the lodge.





After the hike ended, I had to head back to Salt Lake to get ready for work. It was a bummer that I had to leave, because I missed out on the last part of the activity which was dinner and a show. Oh well.

That was my weekend. Lots of fun was had and I met a lot of new people who are now my friends. Who could ask for more?


All pictures were provided by Shelby Castleton©.