As you might guess from the pictures, Mantua hit the spot for our family in early June. The house was booked on airbnb for a week for a wedding, so we were homeless and had decided to relocate to Mantua. The weekend before, Q and I scoped out the Box Elder Campground AND the campground directly adjacent to the reservoir. By our standards, the Box Elder one was far superior. Lots of trees, a stream running through it, off the road. We eyeballed the sights we hoped to score, but found lots of options when we headed up on a Tuesday, so getting just the right one was no problem!
This was only our second big run in the camper, and our longest! Q, to the tune of $300 had replaced our batteries which died on day 2 when we were in Lodge after such minimal light use. These new ones were like the energizer bunny - they kept going and going and after a week (although still a week of paranoid under-use) were still almost at full charge. We did run quite low on fresh water. Our campsite was convenient to the bathrooms, so space in the black and grey tanks held out fine, but we wound up filling our 6 gallon container at the camp spigots to keep water running in the sinks, etc.
I'd also fitted out the camper with more organizational features which mostly did their job at keeping the counters and camper in general free of clutter and usable as work space. And though we fit around the table inside, which was nice for the cold and rainy few days at Lodge, we brought a table and enjoyed eating and cooking outside too. Our favorite camp meal, by far, is tinfoil dinners, and the coals are great for roasting marshmallows to make our favorite camp dessert: s'mores.
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| Lettuce wraps hit the spot for a fast, refreshing dinner. |
And it seemed no one minded sleeping all together, which was surprising considering Kai was along on this trip and the camper was more crowded than ever. But each night Q would play a guided meditation from his phone, and the kids really got into it. And snuggling in the morning is nice too! 
The campground right next to the reservoir was $60/night, and much more like a cramped mobile home park, so it wasn't difficult to just decide to drive 5 minutes from our site to the reservoir, and we enjoyed a day on the water early in the week. I'm a big boob when it comes to cold water, and I don't much like natural bodies of water either, but the kids were troopers. Everyone else went in. Kai and Q swam out to the buoys, the girls played near the beach, and Arthur, who is my little freezer bum, tried to keep up for a bit before joining me on the sand to get the blue out of his lips. Eloise, for all her friendly, social savvy, probably had the most fun. She quickly made friends with girls who had better gear and in no time was on a paddle board with 2 other girls paddling around the water and battling with their brothers, falling in, and shrieking with delight. After we'd had our fun, we got shakes to share at the little market there by the lake, and those hit the spot too. (Though the wait was painfully long - I can't imagine how they run the place when it gets busy!)
The other benefit to Mantua was it's relative proximity to Logan AND to Ogden. On Thursday we commuted in to take Eloise to swimming and Q worked. On Friday, I had a long over-due appointment with a physical therapist, Sean Wayne, in Ogden for my knee. We scheduled it so I was able to drop the rest of the family off in Ogden Canyon at the Huntsville Reservoir before hitting my appointment, and then meet back up with them at the Casper-cousin reunion.
Every year, Q's cousins have organized a cousin reunion, and as family reunions go, it's pretty fun. First, though Q is on the older end of his cousin spectrum, it is organized and FOR families more or less our age. And it is primarily FOR the cousins, or the kids of Q Sr., Claudia, Frank, and Shannon Casperson. I don't know all of their children well, but the cousins who come are a lot of fun, and our kids had a blast with their second cousins. (Especially Eloise and Arthur, who in addition to not being too old on the cousin spectrum themselves, are just the right age to have a fun time playing with kids they don't know well.)
When I got back up the canyon, all my family was on uncle Kyle's boat. Kai and Eloise both tried water skiing and weren't too bad at it. After a while, the girls were dropped off in the water near where the rest of us were hanging out at the beach, and they swam in to play on the paddle boards and get warm on the beach. The sun was nice, but there was a pretty strong wind which grew tiresome to me after a while of sitting and visiting in it. So I was glad when everyone made their way back to the campsite and the boat came in.
After that, there was a hodge-podge dinner. I think everyone was supposed to bring their own, but maybe the girls in the family communicated that a bit more clearly to one another and the message didn't come through my husband. We mooched, and everyone was nice to share. We did add s'more fixings to the mix and I don't think my kids left hungry. It was fun to just sit around what was initially two fires and visit. (Q, however, had built a superior fire, and eventually everyone landed where the flames were bigger, and thanks to Kai's chopping action, the fuel was plentiful.) Fun and funny stories and memories were shared, and we left late and feeling relatively excited about joining the party the following morning.
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| The crazy second-cousins the following morning. |
Only once again, communication wasn't that clear. We arrived late with hash browns to share but all the breakfast food was put away. While we mooched once again, and they were sweet to fire up the grill and do a few more pancakes, everyone began to pack up. Before we knew it, everyone was saying good-bye. It was a short camp - maybe as long as the little kids and adults sleeping with them in tents could handle, but we had just arrived and were ready to party. Right as everyone was about to pull out, Kris and Zoey pulled up too. So when all the cousins left, we convinced them to join us exploring Ogden's Dinosaur Park.
We totally scored! It was their free day and it just hit the spot. We strolled about and followed the kids' lead and pacing, chatting with Kris and Zoey and snapping funny pictures. After seeing most of what was outside and a bit of the inside displays, we chilled in the shade while Eloise, Arthur and Zoey hit the playground. It was more crowded than when we'd been there in the past, but still so fun. And after THAT, Kris said he was stopping by the Maddox drive-up in Brigham City and we opted to join him. Q, for all of this eating, was trying a 3 day fast. Q really enjoys the spiritual cleansing long fasting provides, so he dropped us off at the drive-up and we ate at a picnic table while he went to see if a cowboy we saw broken down on the side of the road needed a ride. (He didn't.)
So that was Saturday. On Sunday we drove back in to Logan to attend church with our branch. And Mimi and Gaga came for dinner on Sunday and brought us a vehicle to tow the trailer home with too. We left the campground Monday, but didn't go home before we'd stopped for one last dip in the reservoir.
That wrapped up our Mantua adventures, and they hit the spot! Near to the campground, there were gorgeous poppy fields in bloom and EV and Eloise had a lot of fun gathering and arranging the wild flowers. Kai took out a lot of his teen angst by chopping wood, and made me laugh in the process, singing "I don't got no lady-friend hound dog vowing to be true," as he chopped. Q was able to push a reset button with his fast. The littles got a lot of play and snuggle time. It was just lovely, all in all.
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