Moore Family Vacation 2017

Pickerel, Wisconsin: 19-25 August 2017

Every two years, we get this bunch together for a week! This has been our third time together for a family reunion/vacation. The first one was in 2013 the week after I entered the missionary training center... thanks guys. The second one was just a month after I returned from my mission, and this one was while Christy was in Spain on her mission.

Here is an awesome video that my phone made automatically. It shows a little bit of all the fun we had!

Here's Hannah and I at church in the small branch we attended in Wisconsin. With all of our family there, we doubled the congregation.

The house that we stayed at was right on a lake, and we had a huge property all to ourselves. There were hardly even any other people out on the lake. The weather was awesome, but could have been a bit warmer. The house had canoes, row boats and some other beach things for us to use, and Tyler rented a pontoon for the week.

As you could see in the big family picture, there are starting to be a lot of grandchildren in our family! We love them all, but it was nice to not have kids and be able to run away together. We took the row boat out one evening to escape crazy time in the house.

After our big group family pictures, I set up our camera with the attached remote and my niece Hannah was our photographer. She was super cute in telling us how to sit and what poses to do!

Melanie and I out on the paddle boat. She wasn't much help, but she sure was cute!

Ellowyn and I driving the pontoon!

Carli and Hannah enjoying the ride.

Tyler, AnnaMarie, Jack and Aiden. Aiden was focused on his "boat snack". There was a big sink on the boat with a lid that was chalk full of snacks. I'm not sure if the kids came on the boat to go knee boarding, or to get a snack.

Tyler and I honed our waterskiing skills over the course of the week and managed to get both of us up at once! We also managed to cross sides by climbing up the rope a bit and crouching down to pass under the other's rope.

Knee boarding was definitely the easiest to get the hang of and was the most fun because it was easy to do tricks like flipping around backwards and jumping off the wake.

Carli was also awesome at knee boarding even though she was little nervous. 

A crew of tubers coming back to the dock.

Dad, Jack, AnnaMarie and Aiden

Carli was like Steve Irwin as she chased down this little froggy... Actually I think I caught it.

Another pass time was fishing. There weren't many fish caught, but I did catch my first fish ever! This little guy. I even took him back to shore, cut him up, fried him, and ate him.

Here's Dad out on the canoe!

We also played a lot of lawn games. Water-balloon fights, wiffle ball and other fun stuff! 

Here's James and Melanie hanging out in the hammock!

And Jack! He carried around this turtle for the entire week. It was really cute. Also, one day he was standing on this dock, and was fully clothed. He was playing at the end of the dock and I was about 3 feet behind him and turned around just in time to not see him fall in. I heard a splash, turned around and Jack was gone! So I reached down in the water and yanked him back on the dock. He didn't play at the edge of the dock after that.

There was a lot of other fun stuff we did like soda tasing, and inside games, but I didn't have many pictures. Here's one last look at how beautiful Wisconsin is.

First Full Marathon & Backpacking Mt. Timpanogos

Deseret News Marathon: 24 July 2017

Growing up I never even imagined running for fun. The summer before my freshman year of high school I ran a hometown 5k run with my sister Abbey, and afterwards her friends who were on the cross country team were talking me up to convince me to join the team. My time was not good, but they made me think it was and that I had potential. They somehow convinced me to join the team that next August. I was never any good, but they needed a 7th man for the team. (It was a small high school) I stuck with the sport through high school and enjoyed being part of the team and going on the trips. Looking back, joining the cross country team was probably one of the best things I could have done for my life. It taught me how to run, and the value of living a fit healthy lifestyle. The inspiration to run a marathon came while serving as a missionary in Russia in 2013-2015 as our mission president recounted his experience running his first marathon.

The morning of the 24th was an early one as I had to bus out to the starting line up in the mountains.

The first half of the marathon was in the canyon, and we were already at about 16 miles when we were spit out into the city. I ran a half marathon in the summer of 2015, and had a time of 1:52. At the halfway point of this marathon I was about 5 minutes ahead of that time and I was feeling really good. 

This is about when I stopped feeling good... All i have to say is that the wall is real! Up until mile 19 I was on track to finish the marathon in under 4 hours. The last 6 or so miles were really rough.

I sat by this guy on the bus to the starting line and he caught up to me as I was struggling to finish the final stretch and motivated me along the way.

You can't see the pain I'm in...

The final mile of the marathon followed the pioneer day parade rout.

Having never run more than 18 miles in one go, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was very happy with the race and even happier to be done!

Hiking Mt. Timpanogos: 8 July 2017

Clint, Carli and I set out to hike Mt. Timpanogos one day. Our plan was to hike up to a valley near the top to camp, then wake up before sunrise and hike the rest of the way up to catch the sunrise.

We were doing great, and were about 4 miles up when we came to a huge section of pack ice covering the trail and going up and down the mountain. The snow would normally have been gone by then, but we had a record snowfall winter leaving spring and summer hiking to start later.

The first couple patches weren't very wide, so we made our way across them which was pretty sketchy. If we slipped, we would have slid down about 25 yards. After we made it across the two smaller ones we turned the corner of the mountain and there were two huge areas that we knew we couldn't cross. There was a group of 5 or so hikers far out on the ice that looked like they had crampons and ropes and stuff. We thought it wouldn't be safe to cross and decided to hike back down. We stopped there and enjoyed the dinner that we had packed, and ate and drank as much as we could to lighten the load for our hike down.