A Day in the Life

A Photoblog by Joel

Bear Lake. Kind of.

August 26, 2023

We love camping. Most of our adventures have been in spots where you find yourself a nice piece of land and bookdock – stay without any hookups, use only what you bring and what your trailer can do. Which I really like doing! There’s just something cool about being self-sufficient like that.

However, sometimes it’s nice to have full hookups and make it even more like home, especially when you can run the AC as much as you need to stay cool. This weekend we stayed at a KOA campground at Bear Lake and it was SO GREAT. This particular KOA had a fantastic play area for kids, and several activities throughout the day for us to enjoy. Also, we went with some friends and got campsites that faced each other which gave us a great big lawn between us. It was so much fun. The worst part was leaving, because none of us wanted to.

Oh, why is this called Bear Lake, Kind of? Because we didn’t actually visit the Lake itself, just camped close and enjoyed from a distance. I definitely want to stay here again, though, and on that trip we’ll spend a day or more at the beach.

One of the first things we saw going on was a Golf Cart pulling barrels. The kids ran to ride it immediately.
Our first morning there I got a text message from the camp hosts telling us about ceramic painting. Heck yes!
These are really cool looking, and seem really fun. But they are not fun. Not at all fun. It was $35 to rent for an hour, and we wanted to ride it a mile in to town for Raspberry shakes. It was miserable. And more expensive than it would have been to just take an Uber. Or, you know, walk. Which is what my plan was until I lost to the pleadings of the children. I guess they had fun on it.
Does this look like $20 worth of Ice Cream? Cause it was $20. Yeah, I’m kinda bitter about that too. Between the transportation and the ice cream, this was a very expensive lunch trip.
On Friday afternoon we took a trip to Minnetonka Cave, about 45 minutes away. It was really neat… for the 30% I got to explore before Emily had to go to the bathroom.

Actually, there was one more thing that was the worst worst. We had just gotten off I-15 at Brigham City on our way to Bear Lake on Thursday, and started the climb up and over Logan Canyon when the AC decided to stop working. I spent about an hour in Logan trying to bring it back to life with some simple fixes but had no luck, so we had to finish the drive to Bear Lake with the windows down. That part honestly wasn’t too bad as we were in another canyon and the temp was probably 10º or 15º cooler. Saturday, coming home on I-15 in the afternoon on an 85º day… I don’t really want to ever, every do that again. It was loud. It was warm. It was uncomfortable. It was sweaty. Just, no thanks. 0/10 do not recommend.

It only took 15 years and 160,000 miles to kill the AC, so, I guess it had a good life. It’s been rattly and noisy the whole time I’ve had this car so I’m not surprised at all. Fret not, the replacement AC Compressor is already on the way and will be fixed soon. Cool adventures will resume shortly.

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