We headed up to Rock Springs, WY last weekend to see Ben's Brother, sis in law and niece. Neither of us have ever been up there. We headed up Saturday morning and took Jesse's Ben's other brother in our car. Cheyenne (Ben's lil sis) drove with Ben's other brother in the Uhaul (they needed to bring some stuff up to their house) and then Angela (sis in law) drove with Alexis (niece) in their car. It was not a bad drive up there at all only about 3 hours. Once everyone was up there the boys all unloaded the stuff, and Alexis and I played in driveway. We played the hokey pokey and all sorts of fun other games. She kills me. She is so fun and happy and has extreme amounts of energy. Then we headed inside and played some more and watched some of the movie Tangled while the boys did something on the computer. Later we all played on the Xbox Kinnect doing dance competitions and sports. It was awesome! Alexis was so cute doing her little dances and we all had a little competive side come out during the sports competition. We played for quite a while but it was so fun. That night we went out to dinner at a really yummy BBQ place. Ben had some fried swordfish or something and I ordered chicken, little did I know it was the whole side of chicken. The food was so flipping delicious! Once we got home Alexis was still super hyper so Ben and I played with her for a while. She was so funny. I tried to convince her I was too tired to play and she gave me a very sad face and said "you don't want to play with me anymore"...too sad. We finally all went too bed but poor Alexis woke up really sick and her and Angela were up since about 4am. We had a yummy breakfast and Jesse finished working on the computer and we headed back home. We had woke up to snow but the roads weren't too bad starting out but we hit about 3 really bad patches of ice and snow it was a little scary. We made it home ok though and for some reason really exhausted and took a nap. Now that we know what the drive is like we hope to head up there more often. I brought my camera but didn't take pictures...Dang it!
This weekend was supposed to be the Spring FTX. Key word there supposed to be. We still sort of had it but it was modified. We show up Friday morning at the ROTC building get everything situated and head to first formation and LTC Johnson the commander of the Ute Warrior Battalion explains that he has made a decision to modify the FTX because of weather. The other two schools we were heading down with had already canceled as well. Camp Williams where we would have had it had a ton of snow and it was cold and it would be difficult because of weather to get anyone to a medical facility if anything happened. So they decided that the MSIII's and MSIV's would be required to go up to the keyhole (up by Red Butte Gardens) for some training and MSI's and MSII's it would be optional for. Ben and I decided that we wouldn't go up Friday and it worked out nice because it was Grandma Smiths birthday so we were able to celebrate with her. Saturday I chose to go up. It was snowing like crazy. I wore some warm clothes under my ACU's and then we put our wet weather gear ( material that the water just slides off and doesn't penetrate through). Hiking up to the key hole I actually got really hot and then parts of me were kinda cold and then I'd get hot. The weather got worse and worse the longer we were up there. It was way fun though. We did a patrolling lane with a raid and we had to capture an enemy. We were running all over the mountain and hiding in ditches it was so fun! (Time frame was about 4 hours) We were supposed to do 3 of those kinds of scenarios but the weather got too bad. While walking around I actually slipped and fell in like a 2 foot hole. I hurried and got up out of it but later my ankle started hurting. As we were headed back to our cars my wet weather pants were falling down so I stopped to pull them up and they made the whole platoon stop and wait for me and then had me go up front they started falling down again and MSG White said I was going to get myself killed if I didn't pull them up. Ugh. I was getting so frustrated with my stinking pants! We loaded all the equipment up and headed back to the ROTC building. I had totally forgot to eat breakfast that morning and I was starving. They had some MRE's that we could eat but they are not the greatest food and I'm really picky so I just held off. It's like cold spaghetti and stuff like that. I would eat if I was in the middle of no where and there were no other option but I knew there with other options minutes away. I know I'm crazy. Anyways, after about a 10 minute break they had us take a written land navigation test. I was scared because it's not my best subject but with some help from my friend I started to figure it out and felt a lot better about it. Basically you find certain points on a a map and then find where something is in relation to that point or find the distance between 2 points. Pretty cool actually. After that we were excused to go home. I was so exhausted. I came home and Ben made me some hot chocolate and then I took a nap and Ben took me to dinner and then we just relaxed. I'm still pretty exhausted and sore today. Both my ankles feel funny too don't know whats going on there. It was a great experience though I'm glad I went up.
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