Lifestyle Photography by Sadie

Sadie followed me with the camera one day as I got Elise up from her nap and changed her diaper.

The End

Hee Haws

Here's a hot tip for all you Utah County people: Hee Haw farms is open every Friday evening in September. There is no entrance fee and you can go down the big slide and see animals for free. You can pay $1 for pony and animal train rides. Maybe it isn't such a hot tip since this Friday is the grand opening of the Halloween stuff. There's always next year.

Sadie remembered Bear the pony from our visit last October.

Elise pointed and whined like crazy to get on the horse and she really did enjoy it.

Sadie was super excited to pose here but didn't like the blazing sun in her face.

The compromise with going in September is that they don't clean up much. Sadie got filthy, but it was free.

The most important thing to Sadie was riding on the animal train. Coming off the surprise of Elise riding the pony and loving it we decided she could try the train. Do you see Elise in the picture above? No? That's because she slid onto her back and screamed the entire time. She's in the pig cart right behind Sadie.

I climbed on in and enjoyed a bumpy ride around the farm.

We'll be returning in a couple weeks when all the Halloween festivities are up and running.

Bike "riding"

Last week when it was still 80+ degrees in the afternoon we went around the corner to the church parking lot to ride bikes.

The actual riding lasted about 10 minutes and then it turned to pushing and/or whining.

Then I carried Elise and both bikes home.

Good times.

Apple Picking

Last year we went apple picking in the most beautiful setting ever. This year that orchard wasn't open so we scrounged around for another place to go picking. When we first drove up to this place Daniel insisted that it was closed and he left. Hillary and I convinced him to turn around and we found out it is open, but just not well-kept. We hiked back into the orchard area and actually found some delicious apples. We got some great peaches too.

Thanks to Daniel and Ben for indulging the John girls in our expected annual tradition of apple picking, even though Utah doesn't really have apple orchards. Until next year...

Grand Cayman

The last stop of the trip was Grand Cayman Island. We planned to go to 7 Mile Beach, which was voted the best Caribbean beach so we figured it would just be fun to spend the day there. What we didn't think about was the fact that we would have already spent multiple days at beautiful beaches so how impressed we were with a beautiful beach was lower than earlier in the week. We also read that it was only a mile and a half away so we insisted on walking. 

When it's 100 degrees outside with like 85% humidity and you don't know exactly where you are walking, every single steps feels like torture. We finally turned towards the beach and rejoiced.

When we made it there we were rewarded with this beautiful scene.

We tried laying out but it was almost too hot to even do that.

 We collected some random shells, which I then decided I was too lazy to bring back.

We walked along the beach trying to find a decent deal on some sort of fun thing, like kayaks. Everyone wanted $30+ an hour for kayaks. No thanks. There are resorts all along the beach. This one had floating tables so we stopped and rested a while.

When we got back to our stuff Nick worked us a deal on some floaties so the girls relaxed in the water while the guys threw rocks. 

Nope, not kidding about the throwing rocks thing.

Floating was pretty amazing until Nick and Daniel decided we needed to have some sort of competition with them.

We attempted to take a few underwater pictures which just turned out hilariously horrible. This one of the Cottles came out the best. Then a pirate ship floated by so we paused for a photo op.

And that was our day on Grand Cayman Island.

And that was our trip.
We came back home and I still don't want to face the reality that I have any kind of responsibility for anything/anyone. Til next time, Cottle family! European cruise '16?

Honduras

So our third stop was Roatan, Honduras. It's a small island. We came out of the port and walked up this hill to find our guides for ziplining. At the bottom of the hill there were a bunch of guys who would yell to each new tourist that came up over the hill, trying to get them to come with them. There was clearly a line they weren't allowed to cross if they weren't already meeting people.

A driver took us to the other side of the island with the ziplining course. Ziplining is the thing that Roatan is known for so we were excited. There were 11 different lines that ranged from a few hundred feet to over a thousand. As we went through the trees we could see the ocean on the other side of us. An amazing setting, for sure. Our guides took our camera and took all these pictures for us with it. 

Most of the time we just ziplined across and braked ourselves (like Lexie above), but we each got the chance to go upside down and/or "Superman" style with one of the guides. I've included those pictures because they are the funniest.

*I was the first one to try it upside down and it was actually fairly painful. My harness left bruises around my hips.

On the last line they had us go across as couples. The Cottle's picture came out cute. Ours was terrible.

We made our guides race to get the boys' harnesses off at the end. It was pretty funny and I think Fast Eddie was a little disappointed that he lost.

Lexie stopped to pose with the monkey when we were done.

After ziplining our driver took us over to West Bay beach. It was gorgeous. The water was very still and salty. I don't really like salt water, but I do like how easily you float in it.

I love this picture.

We decided it would be really cool to try to stack as many people as we could. It was all funny until Nick got squeezed out from between us and I fell straight down onto Daniel's head. Then we all laughed at how stupid we are. I got a nice bruise and I am still nursing a sore jaw from it 3 weeks later. Apparently we caused quite a scene because a woman came up to me in the ship later and asked how I was doing.

Of course any trip to the beach wouldn't be complete without digging a pointless hole. This was made especially fun by our little friend Henry joining in. His mom was selling stuff on the beach. Lexie and I refrained from writing anything in the sand this time, but just know that we were thinking it the whole time they dug.

Lexie and I took a long walk on the beach and bought all the girls some handmade Honduran dolls. Not the highest quality, but we saw the same dolls for double the cost at the ship port, so I am happy with it. 

All in all, another really great day.