A truly Awesome weekend!!!

I had one of the most fun weekends at ACU yet! Kyle called on Thursday morning and said that the outdoor club (an ACU club) was going to go camping and hiking and he wanted to know if we wanted to go cause there were a few spots open. So we took off Friday afternoon and the only person I knew ahead of time was Kyle. The 13 of us took a road trip though the panhandle, through New Mexico, then back into a state park called Guadeloupe peak in Texas.

We pulled in when it was pitch black and I had no idea what the mountain looked like or even our campsite. We set up in the dark and woke up early to Hike. It was beautiful! It was defiantly dessert camp and we were told to watch for snakes... Ahhhhh. It was a really challenging 8.5 mile hike to the tallest peak in Texas... almost 9,000 ft high. It took about 3 hours to summit. It was 75 degrees and clear. When we all reached the top, we ate lunch, took pictures and met an older couple that became our friends. The woman said that we were so well behaved and we reminded her of her family. Her and her husband had 5 kids in 5 years. When the last one left for college, they sold everything including their house and bought an RV. They are traveling around the country seeing everything. After a while she started calling us her mountain babies, so for the rest of the weekend they were "mom and dad". At the top there was a journal in a safe box where we all wrote a journal entry about making it all the way to the highest peak in Texas. We hiked back down with mom and dad and they came to visit our camp while we cooked burgers for dinner.

It got dark around 6:00. We were EXAHSTED!!!! We sat around singing and looking at the most amazing stars I have seen in my entire life... clear, perfect!! All 13 of us college kids went to bed at 8:30... (On a side note, we had kinda been doing everything an hour earlier than we had planned cause none of us realized that we were on mountain time:) ) It was pretty funny!! We were so tired.

So I slept very well until 1am when the wind was so strong that it was blowing the girls tent all the way flat to the ground. It was 8 ft tall, but every time the wind blew the tent poles hit me in the butt, and I was in the middle of the tent of 8 girls. This continued until about 6am, when the whole camp just decided we were ready to get up (I know, so weird that a bunch of kids would chose to get up 3 hours before planned). Mom and dad came by our camp to invite us to their RV. We packed up our stuff and around 8am, we headed to mom and dads to sing and take communion. for two hours we had our church service. Mom and dad both cried and we all talked about how much the weekend meant to us. We exchanged information and we will hopefully connect up with mom and dad again for next years trip. Then we headed out for our 5 1/2 hour ride home.

I made so many amazing new friends and I am for sure going next trip. Kyle and I are joining the outdoor club to get to do more stuff like this! I came home with horrible blisters and a bit of sunburn, but it was so hard to come back... I wish you could have all seen what I saw and experience what I experience; I can’t even describe to you how awesome and amazing it was!!! I will NEVER forget it.