Camping with the Hite Family- Melissa

I remember trying to camp in New York (I think near the Sacred Grove) one year when we were all very little. All I remember was that it was raining really hard, and it was dark. I think Dad put up all the gear in the rain and dark. I wrote a letter to Prsident Kimball after we went to New York and told him about our trip, and he wrote back!

I also remember the Grand Canyon. I remember we got badges or became little rangers or something. Grandpa & Grandma Melville, Mark and Keith were with us as well. I'm sure at one point Dad probably pretended to "push" us over the edge, but caught us before we could fall. Oh! Remember the song me and Rachel made up during that trip (to the tune of Chestnuts Roasting...), "Chipmunks roasting on an open fire, wildcats leaping off a cliff"... then something about going to the biff. The lyrics were truly inspired.

I remember the day we bought our sleeping bags, and Mom or Dad wrote our names across the bottom with a marker. If I remember right, Rachel got the red one--don't nobody fight with Rachel when she knows what she wants. Another memory about those bags was whe we thought we lost Shelley in the red Orem house (was it Shelley?). She had fallen asleep in the downstairs blanket closet, on the sleeping bags, and wasn't lost after all, Happy day!

I remember having a sleepover at Annie and Johnny's house in boston, and we were sleeping in a tent in their yard. But I was too scared, so I made Dad drive out to get me in the middle of the night.

Our family used to go to a ward camp in Vermont in the summer. I was upset because you had to be 8 to play pool, and I was only 7. We would swim in the little roped off swimming area, and if you caught a fish in the lake, you had to eat it for dinner. Dad helped me catch a fish, but I did not eat it. There was a play house for putting on shows, and a pizza place where I think we had our first hawaiian pizza ever. They brought out the big pizza on one of those pizza stands. The latrines at the camp were labeled, "Ma" and "Pop", but it didn't go over very well one day when we were there and I decided to call Dad, "Pop". I think that was the same summer we moved to Arizona.

Of course, the best camping trip was when Dad sat on the riverbank in his lawn chair, tied a long rope around our waists (one at a time), and we tried to see who could cross the river without getting swept away. And I think I still have rope burns under my armpits from getting pulled upriver and back to shore when I did not make it across.