We’ve been back for a week and I’m finally feeling like I can wrap my brain around a blog post attempt.  We had fun.  Wanna see?

We got to Boise in time for Barry to race in the annual Twilight Criterium in downtown Boise.

See him up there in the lead?  He wasn’t quite in that position at the very end, but he did really well and had a lot of fun in that mass of riders on slick skinny tires riding in circles in 102 degree weather.  It was fun for me to watch while I cast on for my vacation knitting project and visited with old friends from high school/ college.

Boise is a cool town.  Every time I’m there I wish I lived there.

Anyway, we got there and slept on the floor in my parents house for a couple of nights, then headed up to the mountains.

My sister in-law’s family has a big “cabin” on lots of land with a river running through it and a natural hot spring pool.  That’s where we headed and set up camp.  I put the word cabin in parentheses because it has 9 bedrooms, each with it’s own bathroom, a big screen TV and an enormous kitchen.  It was a such a fun, comfortable place for all 22 (give or take, depending on the day) of us to stay.

The kids rode bikes and played horse shoes with their cousins.

They caught butterflies and they swam.

This is Ian’s first ever jump of a diving board.  Isn’t that too cute that he covered his eyes?  I love that kid.

They dug in the sand.  We all swam in the river.

The grandparents watched and my dad said it was impossible to take a good picture of him because his eyes are so squinty.  I have those squinty eyes too.  And I got a good picture.

We watched my dad slam dunk a basketball.  Definitely one of the highlights of the entire trip!

My nephew had a Halloween birthday party while we were there, for which we forgot costumes.  I’m kicking myself that I can’t find a picture of Logan in the hunting outfit he scrounged out of a closet in the cabin, but the impromptu mummy costumes and Captain Garbage Can weren’t too bad either.  The mummies didn’t fare too well during the water balloon games, as you might imagine.

The “Squishy Islands” in the middle of the river were the favorite place for the kids to play.  My sister in-law would have freaked out had she seen the mud bath extravaganza.  The river rinsed it all off in a jiffy though.

And of course, Barry rode his bike to the top of a mountain.  Beautiful, isn’t it?

You want to see a few more pictures, don’t you?  Okay, just a few more…

Aahhh… I love my family.