The Trek

Cathi has returned from Trek to a hero's welcome.  The stake had a special sacrament meeting early this morning to allow the Trekies to pat each other on the back and discuss how dirty they all got and how tough they all were.

To celebrate Cathi's return, we visited The Cheesecake Factory last night.  (Thanks triplets!)  My goodness, it was so deliciously delicious.  We went at 4:00, so the wait was a mere 10 minutes.  I had their world famous meatloaf and Cathi ordered some sort of pasta thing that she gets everywhere.  If you go, I'd recommend going at an off time like we did. When we left, the wait was probably over an hour.  As far as food "factories" go, The Cheesecake Factory is at least twice as good as the Spaghetti Factory.  Anyway, back to the trek...

Cathi has told me bits and pieces of her experience, but I will just highlight a couple that I found the most entertaining.  

The first day she was assigned to a "family" and she was placed as a "child" in that family.  They walked all day long and received very little food for dinner.  However, when they arrived at camp, the adult "leaders" were given a meal "behind the trailers".  Thus, the ma and pa received full, delux sandwich,  but since Cathi was classified as a "child", she only heard about this meal.  She won't admit it, but I believe that this made her a a bit upset.  

During the "women's pull" only women are allowed to pull the handcart up a large hill.  The men just sit around and watch.  Cathi's group was doing great and she said it was much easier than she thought.  Unfortunately, in the group behind hers, there were only four girls.  Cathi alone was asked to go provide some additional aid to help them up the hill.  What had started as an easy task turned into what Cathi described as, "one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life."  I am not sure how it compared to childbirth, but I will trust her on this one.

When Cathi describes her experience, it makes her sound like she was one of the youth.  She said, "I was lucky because my ma and pa were very easy going.  Some of the ma's and pa's were taking their kid's deodorant."  To which I replied, "You do realize that you are a 30 year old adult and not a 16 year old kid.  You probably could have kept your deodorant if you wanted."

She also said that there was a hormone filled boy that kept visiting their family's camp at 3:00 in the morning, sneaking around and looking for a specific girl.  He would crawl up and whisper, "hey... Lucy... are you there Lucy?"  I told her that was funny because I had just heard from an old friend from Layton.  She said that her stake was reconsidering ever doing trek again because last year a girl got pregnant ON TREK!  Ha ha ha.  That is still funny.

I am not going to slander the trek experience too much because she said that overall it wasn't too bad and that she had an okay time.  I am sure the kids got a lot out of it.  I will tell you this though... She said that going once was enough and she doesn't really have a desire to ever go again.