Ball Family Reunion on the Snake River

I'm SO BEHIND WOW. This trip was over two months ago! I'm usually better. I blame pregnancy brain. It's real.

This summer was the long awaited and anticipated Ball Family Reunion on the Snake River! The Ball Family is Dustan's mom's family. Jen and her siblings grew up in Clarkston, Washington right near the Snake River. As the family expanded and Jen and her siblings got married and had kids, they would try to meet every summer and camp for a week on the Snake River together. It has been more inconsistent the last few years has the family has grown bigger and more widespread. But this year, it was planned far in advance and very thoroughly in hopes that the majority of the family could come. And they did! Jen's parents and all of her nine siblings, as well as a majority of the spouses, children, and grandchildren were able to come for at least part of the week. At one point in time, there were nearly 100 people camping on the Snake River together! Here is a short (compared to my usual, wordy blog posts) run down of the week :)

We left late on a Sunday with Bryson and Taylor (Dustan's sister and her husband) and drove straight through the night until we reached Lewiston, Idaho. This is right across the river from Clarkston, and where Dustan's dad's parents actually live. We met Dustan's family and Kraus grandparents there and visited with them in the morning and ate breakfast. It was great to be able to see them! Once it got closer to lunch time, we packed our stuff back into the car and went to meet with the Ball family!

We met them in Clarkston at the Ball grandparents cute home. We visited shortly with some of the family, then headed to the Snake River. We were camping on the opposite side of the river from where we parked, so Dustan's uncles helped to shuttle us across and up the River a ways on their jet boats to our camping spot. From there, we popped up our tents, put on on our swimsuits, and lounged by the river and waited for more family to arrive :) I'll just talk about some of the activities we did while there. This is not the type of trip you need a day by day account of!

This vacation/reunion was super chill. Basically, we sat around on the beach chatting, napping, and eating. When we needed to cool off (it was hot!) we would jump in the water. When we wanted to do something a little more, we could hop on one of the jet skis and ride around a bit or take a boat ride up the river and float down the rapids. Each family was in charge of their own breakfast and lunch meals, but everyone ate together for dinner with different families in charge of preparing it each day. In the evening, people would stay up late chatting in the dark or we would watch a movie or family home videos on a projector. And that is what we did all week! So now, just a couple stories and accounts of specific things we did.

What the typical relaxing beach scene looked like

On one of our first days camping on the beach, a group of us decided we wanted to float down the river. We grabbed some floaties and life jackets and just hiked up the river a short ways. There weren't enough life jackets and floaties for everyone to have one, so there was a good mix. Dustan and I ended up without life jackets, but with a giant inflatable duck, haha. Once we had hiked up past some of the rapids just before our campsite, we all hopped in the river and began floating down. The goal was to float down to our campsite on the beach and swim in to shore before reaching the next set of more shallow rapids after our beach. And that plan failed! We had SO much fun going through the first rapids, then we immediately hopped off the duck and began swimming for shore. But apparently that giant duck has a lot of drag, because we made little to no progress getting out of the current. Before we knew it, we were sucked back in and headed toward the next rapids (we weren't the only ones). This caused a little bit of panic, since these rapids were far more shallow with the chance of getting sucked under or hitting a rock. We all quickly got ourselves onto our backs with our feet downriver as we floated through them, all the while still holding on to our duck that we should have just stayed on top of, haha. Everyone got past the rapids just fine, and soon enough one of our boats came by to rescue us and take us back to the campsite! I'm so glad Dustan had our GoPro on for this, haha.

Approaching the rapids...

Attempting to swim back to shore

Kraus rescue attempt

Boat rescue!

One of the favorite activities of the older teens and young adults (i.e. us) were the jet skis! Though riding with Dustan was fun, the backseat of the jet ski was a little bouncier than I would have liked and I had less control, which made me slightly worried about baby girl. So, we usually just drove separately. But it was so fun! Neither of us had been jet skiing since our honeymoon almost three years earlier.

Nearly every family on the beach was able to take a long boat ride up the Snake River at some point. Two of the three jet boats would take a couple families and go explore Hell's Canyon, stop and swim, eat lunch, and do some fishing. This was definitely one of my favorite days of the trip, even if Dustan and I didn't go with any of the Kraus clan. We drove a ways up before making a quick stop to get a permit to enter Hell's Canyon, then continued on our way. We road the jet boats up for nearly two hours. It was beautiful! Where we had been camping, it was mostly yellowish and dead in the surrounding area. In Hell's Canyon, rock cliffs rose up high on either side and some greenery appeared. A few times, Dustan's uncle drove us up to some high rapids and let the jet boat just float through them. We got soaked. Water came pouring in from all sides! It was a blast! A couple times we pulled over at a beach to eat some lunch and swim around in the chilly water. When we were in a calm area of the river, we would stand on the back of the jet boat and do some fishing. I went fishing for the first time here and caught a few fish. After those fun adventures, it was over an hour boat ride back to our campsite. Overall, an awesome activity!

Another fun activity we did a couple times was float the big rapids that were upriver a few miles, called the Captain Lewis Rapids. Everyone wore life jackets on these, no exceptions. And most of us chose not to bring floaties, since you probably wouldn't be able to hold on to them anyway. These rapids were way bigger than the ones near our beach. Some of the swells were well over five feet tall. The all-knowing-boat-driving-uncles would instruct us to keep floating with your legs near the surface and downriver, and breathe whenever you feel your head isn't underwater any more, haha. Then they would drive to the beginning of the rapids and have us jump off the boat while it was still moving so the boat wouldn't float through the rapids as well. Honestly, I think you could call the first time we floated down these rapids as "slightly controlled drowning", haha. We were underwater a lot more than we expected and it was a little disorienting. But that didn't stop us from going a few more times throughout the week! It really was fun, you just had to know to breathe when you were above water, and just hold your breath the rest of the time, haha. Unfortunately, no pictures from this.

Some other random notes about the week:

• The stars that came out at night were incredible, and Dustan finally got to do some successful astrophotography 
• It was about 90 to 100 degrees during the day, but cooled down to the 60s at night (thank goodness)
• Garrett (Dustan's brother) and multiple other kids was buried all the way up to their necks in sand
• There were multiple babies under the age of one camping out with us
• I felt baby girl kick for the first time on this trip
• There were three porta potties, but we were only allowed to go #2 in them, or they would fill up too fast... If you needed to pee, you got in the river, haha
• Large frogs occasionally invaded the camp--I got one tossed down my shirt, gross

Overall, it was such a fun week!! It was so relaxing, and great to get to know Dustan's extended family a little better. On one of the evenings, we coordinated a giant picture with as much of the family as possible. There ended up being nearly 100 people in that picture (the most people ever on the beach at once), and a few were even still missing! The best picture is at the top of the blog post, below is a goofy pic, a pic with the wonderful grandparents and kids that built the family (kids ordered from oldest to youngest), and of course a Kraus family picture. It was amazing to see a family so big come and spend a week on the River together. We had a blast :)