The Adventure continues - St. Johns

St. Johns was awesome and my parents were great hosts! Louise and her kids came in one day after us. The rest of my siblings all showed up over the week with many of their kids in tow, with the exception of Steven, but we had been fortunate enough to see them on the way out west, and of course, Eric and Char live there already. We were especially grateful to Richard, Merrilee and family for picking up Stephen en route so he could be with us again. We had so much fun with everyone and we really missed those that didn't make it. Holy Cow! The Ice Cream Social, rodeo, swimming, campfire circle, parade, family dance, boating and you can't forget El Camino! I do believe one of the real highlights of the St. Johns part of the trip was the day we had the pool rented with the Hansen family (Todd and family live in our area in Florida and they graciously invited us to bring our family along and join them for the time they had the pool rented, something they may have ended up regretting). We are so loud that I am sure we shook up the more sedate Hansen clan, they did say we were entertaining. We had belly flop competitions, handstand competitions, played games, were loud and rowdy and had the best time ever at the pool! Everyone, even the much older kids (I'm talking 20's and on up) said it was incredibly fun! We have some real daredevils and not just one character in the bunch (many, many characters...)! They held off the belly flop competition until Randy got there as he worked every day we were on the road except the weekends so he joined us for his lunch break. My face hurt from laughing, my family really makes me laugh. The last night with everyone we just had to play night games, it has become a family tradition (and one of my favorites, a childhood throwback). We played sardines for a while, and tried a few other games then settled into Capture the Flag. By the time we were on the last game, the younger kids were gone to bed, we were down to only 8 players, it was very late (well after midnight so you can understand how nuts this all is) and we ended up with one very unfortunate incident when Nicole went to free Yorke from jail with big Matt as the jailer. She came in low trying to be quiet and out of Matt's sight, but he was going low trying to get between Nicole and Yorke and the score ended up Matt's forearm - 1, Nicole's nose - broken. Janet and Amy looked out the kitchen window when they heard a scream and suddenly saw all of us clustered in one spot with the glow of cell phones lighting up the grass as we tried to get a look at Nicole's nose! Gratefully she has recovered (nose is beautiful as ever, I have seen it in person) and is back teaching school again, but the poor girl was in a bad way that night! Thank heaven we were carrying heavy duty pain relievers, for just in case, cause they may be the only reason she got sleep that night. It was such fun, in spite of the one incident, and we hated to say goodbye to everyone as they all headed home. We did get a couple more quiet days with just us and Dad and Mom which was really great. We took one afternoon and ran down to Tempe to see Grandma Stoker, who is 93, and we enjoyed our visit with her. Then we went to Mark and Alonna's where we enjoyed dinner with many of the family that are in the valley. It was so great to see all of them, especially Justin and Janet who just moved back to Arizona, we had not seen them since we moved away from Temecula and they have 2 more kids since then! Thanks to all who made the whole Arizona leg so much fun!