Thursday, 7/5/2018 – Sunday, 7/8/2018 – Time for a quiet, peaceful, no-cell-reception getaway!  Since the 4th of July was on a Wednesday this year, it was a 50/50 guess of which weekend would be quieter at camp.  Apparently we made the right decision by going the weekend after the holiday.  Except for a few random fireworks in the middle of the night, there was no one around.  And it was glorious!  We even got to see an elk on Saturday evening.

Wednesday, 7/11/2018 – Josh’s company recently finished a huge, beautiful new medical building and, to celebrate, we headed to the grand opening event.  Did I mention there was free drinks AND ice cream sundaes?!

Saturday, 7/14/2018 – Thanks to the help of a friend, some family, a few chainsaws and a beast of a chipper, we got a TON done today!  All of the tree tops left over from the storm and then the logging company taking a few trees down got chipped.  And we made a HUGE pile of firewood that’ll get split another day.  With any luck, our contractor will begin repairs on the house after he returns from vacation next week and we CAN’T WAIT!  In other news…we got a new “squirrel proof” bird feeder.  It’s not quite working out the way we had hoped, but, it’s been entertaining!

Friday, 7/20/2018 – Sunday, 7/22/2018 – This weekend ended up being a perfect storm of scuba diving events for us and it was INCREDIBLE!  Women’s Dive Day was Saturday, 7/21/2018, which lined up perfectly with an opportunity for us to complete our Advanced Open Water certifications.  We packed up all of our camping stuff and headed to Dutch Springs for a weekend full of diving, camping and making new friends.  We arrived on Friday evening and got busy setting up our tent and getting things unload for the weekend.  Friday evening was pretty uneventful.  Saturday was Women’s Dive Day and we were up bright and sunshiney early at 6am to help West Shore Scuba get thing set up and ready for the day.  Josh started the day by getting a few dives in, setting up the underwater obstacle course.  He still says that this was his favorite part of the whole weekend – “doing things underwater.”  Women’s Dive Day was a ton of fun!  Beside winning some prizes and getting free lunch, I got to do an underwater obstacle course that included swimming through three hula hoops, doing a bean bag drop onto a target and pulling a mermaid from a sack.  Many, many thanks to West Shore Scuba for putting the event together for us and to the men who showed up, supported us and helped out so much during Women’s Dive Day!  After the Women’s Dive Day festivities ended, we got started on our Advanced Open Water certification dives on Saturday afternoon.  After an exhausting day of numerous dives on Saturday, we dined on quarry pizza and french fries and ended up sleeping the truck because it poured down raining and our tent was less than weatherproof.  Neither one of us slept well, but sleeping dry in the truck beat the hell out of sleeping wet in the tent all night!  Sunday we completed our final three dives for our Advanced Open Water certifications and got on the road, headed for home, just before it started pouring down rain again.  Despite being a pretty wet weekend, it was a great weekend!  (By the way…we wrote another post detailing our experience taking the Advanced Open Water course right here, if you’re interested.)

Saturday, 7/28/2018 – We spent the morning loading and disposing of the stuff that was in our shed when it was destroyed by the falling trees back in May.  Thankfully, the insurance company battle finally ended and we could finish cleaning up the destruction.  A pretty uneventful weekend but we got a lot accomplished!