Camping will never be the same...

after camping so close to the beach! We drove up to the Coromandel peninsula the day that our classes ended. The Joseph's set up this camping trip ages ago...it was supposed to be for all of the YSA in the stake, but then it got nixed by the stake presidency so it was just 17 of the BYU girls (3 didn't want to go), the Cutri family, all of my Joseph family except Pascal, and Erin's brother Nat who lives in our ward and who we had met a few times before brought 2 of his kids. It was about a 3 or 4 hour trip to get to our camp site, and it was a few hours of heaven! The drive was seriously through some of the most beautiful places that I have ever seen. We drove by a lot of cows as we were going, and my favorite line of the drive was, "these cows are so lucky and they don't even know it. They must be the happiest cows in the world...happy cows don't come from California, they come from New Zealand!" I don't remember who it was that said this, but it was a really funny conversation. The whole time that we were driving we kept saying that we had to take a picture of one area because it was so beautiful, then we would drive just a little further and we would see something even more beautiful and we all wanted a picture of the next scene. It seriously felt like we were driving into heaven because it was so beautiful. I wish that I could spend forever there because a picture will never be enough to show the immense beauty of the place. Our campsite, funny enough, looked a lot like any place that you would go camping in Utah, big trees, mountains and nice little outhouses all around a big open grassy field filled with tents. The only big difference came when you went down the road a bit and over a hill...all the sudden you were standing on a beach on the edge of the most beautiful water that you had ever seen. Anyway, it was an amazing ride, some girls got a little sick because of all of the twisting and curving of the road, but I am a lucky one who is not affected by motion sickness.
We got to the campsite in time for a nice sausage sizzle dinner, and then we played some games while it got darker and darker...that was another big difference between here and camping in Utah...we weren't allowed to have a campfire so we all sat around a propane lantern and wrapped up in blankets (because a cold front was moving through) as it got later. After dinner, we just visited and played some games, and had a ball! We were singing along to Erin's guitar and playing games until like midnight or later. It was so much fun, and the next day we were all very sleepy because of it! After we went in to bed, Brittany Babcock (the other Brittany in our group) read to us from this book called Telesa. It is a book written by a lady in our ward here and it has gone around to a lot of the girls to read, I haven't read it yet but I plan to sometime soon. Anyway, to get us to go to sleep, Brittany did a read aloud from a chapter of Telesa...it was highly entertaining. The next day we got up semi-early, not too early like some of the girls who went diving in the morning. We had a nice New Zealand camp breakfast of cereal followed by some Kenna... For those of you are confused now, wondering what a kenna is, I will post a picture eventually but for now I'll just say it is a sea urchin. You cut it open and eat the orange part inside which is actually its tongue. It is salty and rubbery and probably one of the worst things I have ever eaten, but I did eat it! I think that we got a video of me eating it...another thing that I'll post sometime. I really thought I might throw up after eating that, but I was really proud of myself for giving it a try!