A Day in the Bay : A Day in the Santa Cruz Mountains

We had a ward camp out, and somehow I found myself volunteering to take care of the meals. It was a moment of ignorance as I failed to internalize what kind of work goes into feeding 80 people 2 meals. Luckily it wasn't just me, Alicia and I worked together and got organized.
We of course went to Costco to purchase all of the food, because is there any other way to buy in bulk? That's a real question.

We strategically placed our food into separate carts, recorded what we were buying, added up the price as we went, and tried to estimate how much of each item we would need. But we actually had no idea, and just put stuff in the cart and hoped for the best.

After we loaded our cars, we headed to the church for meal preparation. Taco salad/burritos were on the dinner menu so we cooked all of the meat, cut the tomatoes, and shredded the lettuce. This way it was ready to go for the next night. On Friday we got to the camp site early and finished preparing dinner for the masses. I truly felt a like a real member of the relief society.

Our campsite included a full kitchen, and a indoor dining hall. Dinner was a hit.

So candid.

Since I own no camping gear, I embarked on this camp out with nothing but a pillow (but actually not even that, because I forgot it at home) and faith that somehow my sleeping arrangements would fall into place. Tiffany came later, so she was able to bring me my pillow, and some blankets. Then someone offered me their tent, and then someone else offered me an air mattress. These were definitely blessings from my acts of kitchen duty service. Let me tell you, camping with an air mattress is life changing. I don't know if it even counts as camping at that point. Tiffany and I shared the twin air mattress though, so the sleep I got was still minimal.

When it's warm at night, it's not as fun to sit around the fire.

The night included making smores, singing around the campfire, playing cards (which I won every round), and talking late into the night.

Because Alicia decided to be an over achiever, our breakfast included eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, fruit, muffins, and drinks. I was all for fruit, muffins, and cereal, but somehow that idea got shafted. So we got up early to cook a full breakfast buffet.

We had plenty of kitchen helpers because multiple people had gotten all the sleep that they could get by 7:00 am.
Since I refuse to eat another Krustese "just add water" pancake in my life, I added milk, vanilla, sugar, and cinnamon to the pancake batter. Huge difference.

People will probably remember the food from this camp out with fondness for years. They will look back and someone will ask "remember that one ward camp out...." and someone will respond with "the one with the great food??" I was told that the elders quorum was in charge of food last year, and it was seriously lacking.

I love organized chaos, so I actually really enjoyed planning, preparing and serving the food for the camp out. Or do I actually just love being in charge?? Jury is still out. The San Francisco ward also came to the camp out, and they were in charge of bringing "build your own" sack lunches. Though they failed to bring any sacks or Ziploc bags...

After breakfast we packed up and some of us went on a hike to a water fall, which turned out to be nothing but a nature walk with no waterfall.

Braden convinced three of us to go to Empire Cave, which was located near the camp site.

When we got to our location, it looked like it was just a slab of cement, but when we got closer we could see that there was a hole with a ladder leading down to nothingness.