New Years Eve Day at Carlsbad Caverns

As many of you may already know, for Christmas this year, Heather's family all gathered together in Texas. They do this every two years, and it is always a lot of fun. Now that Heather has retired from teaching (for now), we thought it'd be fun for her to spend some extended time back in her hometown, so she and Elliana stayed in Lubbock for three weeks. I had saved up my annual leave and so I was able to take off almost a week and a half. So we had a great time spending both Christmas and New Years at the Carr house.

Even though we've both been home for over a week, we're still trying to get caught back up and putting our life back in order, as I'm sure many of you are, too. So this won't be a full Christmas blog report; Heather will do that piecemeal later. But I did want to share some pics of our trip to Carlsbad Caverns.

For a long time, now, I've always wanted to go to Carlsbad and see the world famous caverns.

While they are close to Heather's old home, it still is over a 3 hour drive to get there, and so we just never got around to it during our previous trips. But this time, we made it happen. So for New Year's Eve Day, we took a day trip to the caverns, and it was pretty amazing. All the pics below are courtesy of my brother-in-law Chris, who took some amazing pics with his brand new camera.

The caverns are located in the middle of what looks like a wasteland; there's just not much there but hills, brush, and stubby little cacti. As you walk along the National Park path, suddenly a massive hole opens up in the side of this hill, like a mouth. And that's the beginning of the caverns.

We walked in the natural entrance, which is almost a mile and a half down to the bottom of the main show cavern floor (which is about 800 ft down). The central cavern is called the Big Room and is 8.2 acres in size: 4,000 feet long, 625 feet wide, and 350 feet high. It's the third largest chamber in North America and the seventh largest in the world.

One other interesting tidbit: just inside the natural entrance is a massive fork called Bat Cave. During the summer, some 40,000 Mexican free tail bats live there and come out every night to feast. They migrate during the winter, so we didn't get to see it.

Here are some pics of the formations we saw in the Big Cave.

The scale and immensity of space in the caverns at times really was very astounding. Unfortunately, photos can't really capture that very well, so I guess you'll all have to go one day and check it out yourself.

It was a great trip, and I was especially appreciative of Heather's family for going because most of them had gone at some point in their life already. Thanks, guys!

Here's a pic of Gracie standing beneath a stalactite. She was trying to become a stalagmite. I don't think it worked, though.

And here are some more pics of the rock formations.

Thanksgiving Family Pics

My sister Alyson and her husband Nate have tinkered with photography over the last few years. They've picked it up really well, and so occasionally when we get together with them, we ask them to take a family picture of us.

Here are the pics that Alyson took of us this time. Thanks again for doing this, Alyson! We loved how they turned out.

Heather hogged all the pics with Elli on her blessing day (just kidding, sweatheart!), so this time, Alyson took some shots just of me and Elli.

Thanksgiving Fun

This year for Thanksgiving, we had a host of family come into town. Sarena and Adam and co, Alyson and Nate and co, and Mom and Dad all made it. We divided the group up between our house and Tys and Diana's, and it worked great. Besides my family all gathering, Adam (my brother in law) has a sister (Meagan) who lives in our ward, and so they had their parents and another sister (Brittany) with her kids all stay with them. It was a multi-family holiday festival.

Fortunately, we were able to reserve the church to hold our Thanksgiving meal for our large combined group. The church worked out perfect. Each family made a few dishes, and when we put them all together, we had an enormous feast. The kids had more than enough space to run around and play. They set up an obstacle course in the gym (see the pics below). We also had a gigantic game of hide and go seek as well as hooked up a projector and had near life-sized kid movies playing. The best part was that all the utensils, plates, cups, etc were disposable. We still had plenty of cleaning up to do, but it just felt good not having to scrub a mound of silverware.

Here's Treyton doing the obstacle course under Trevor's close watch.

Not surprisingly, one of us got hurt while doing the obstacle course. In case you can't guess who, it was Tys. Nothing broken, though, so we count that as success.

Here we all are sitting down for dinner.

After the meal, we had a really special family event. Trevor had just turned 12 the week before, which made him eligible to receive the priesthood. Adam got permission to confer the priesthood on Trevor when we were all gathered together for Thanksgiving. So we all changed into Sunday clothes, the men gathered around Trevor, and we conferred the priesthood upon him. It was a very neat experience and I'm glad that Trevor invited us to participate.

Here are some other random, fun family shots from Thanksgiving.

I love this next pic of Elli. It captures her "other side." Typically, Elli is all happiness and smiles, when she is around Heather, that is. Occasionally, she will be great for me, too. But often, she gets in these moods where all she wants is mommy. This is one of those moments below, where grandpa was helpless to console Elli. I know that feeling well, Dad.

All smiles now!

One of my favorite family traditions is making turkey cookies. The name doesn't always conjure up the best image if you've never eaten or seen a turkey cookie before, so allow me to explain. First, no: we don't use turkey or any other meat for the cookie. Instead, we use chocolate, candy corns, more chocolate, red hots, and even more chocolate to make a turkey. It's delicious.

Here's what they look like. The candy corns are the feathers. The Hershey's kiss is the body. The two chocolate chips stuck together form the head with a red hot gobbler underneath. Then the last two chocolate chips protruding from the Hershey's kiss form the legs so that it can stand up.

While everyone was in town, we did all sorts of fun things. We organized our very own family fun run. Most of the younger kids ran a half mile, then the older adults ran about 3 miles. It was truly freezing cold that morning despite the sun being out, but we had a lot of fun.

Here we are at the starting line.

Elli decided not to run; she was too busy being absolutely adorable and cuddly in her warm car seat.

Dad manned the water table at the finish line. Diana made some peanut butter cup medals for the finishers. That certainly motivated me.

Here's Jayci and Nate struggling with every ounce of energy they had for the finish line and a personal record. Either that, or Jayci was distracted by looking at everything around her. Cute girl! (And Nate, you're cute, too.)

Here's Logan catching Heather.

Treyton flew passed me at the end.

Karinn led the pack to the finish line.

Besides running, we also took a trip to the Great Falls Park. We went on a little hike along the river, explored the museum there, and some of the kids (ahem ... Jared), climbed on everything they saw. It was pretty incredible to watch Jared shimmy up the side of the museum wall.

It was a great holiday break and over way too quickly. We miss everyone already, but it's nice to know that there will always be more family-filled holidays and vacations.