Well, it finally came.  The week when the Gillespie girls come to stay!  On Monday, my sister, Margaret, and I met in Fillmore and had a picnic.  Then her three girls got in my car with all their gear and we stole them away to Springville!  There were many melty bead creations made, as usual.  Also, there were many theatrical productions, as we have also come to expect!

The girls all got along really well all week.  At night they listened to Treasure Island so they could stop talking long enough to fall asleep.  Everyone came to the mall with me to get Benjamin’s one-year picture taken.  (Yes, I took ten children to the mall!  Hello?)  We went to the Spanish Fork pool on Thursday and wore everyone out.  (Yes, I took ten children to the pool!  Hello?  Actually, Grandma Gazdik took Ben so it wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds.)  They also enjoyed playing games on the ipad.  That thing is fun!

Becca and Emily and Megan had great times.  They even bought “Best-Friends-Forever” necklaces at the mall.

Mariah and Elizabeth had great times together, too.  I think they both feel like “the younger sister no one wants to play with” in their families so they loved having each other.  They were like, “We don’t need you guys because we have each other!  Ha!”

On Thursday, our neighbors came over and asked if we wanted to come to their work party Saturday morning which just happened to be an early showing of Cars 2 in the theatre!  Boy did we ever!  Saturday was also the day I was supposed to take the Gillespies back toward home.  So, Saturday morning we packed up, hurried ourselves over to the movie theatre, had great fun watching Cars, ran home to pick up Benjamin and the lunch fixin’s, and then spent the next few hours in a car driving south!  It was a busy day already, but the best was yet to come.  That’s because Maggie and I were meeting at Puffer Lake!

Puffer Lake is 22 miles east of Beaver (and practically straight up since it is at 10,000 feet!).  This lake is special to us because our mom’s mom used to spend time there as a little girl seeing as her uncle (Neils Jensen) owned the whole place.  Cool, huh?  There used to be a lake in our family!  As soon as we got there, we started exploring.  First we found the old boat house.

We figured this out because there was a boat in it.

  Then we started around the lake in the other direction.  There was a road, but it was pretty rutted and there were some trees fallen across it in some places, so we walked.

We found some old cabins almost right away.  The water is really high this year as you can see the trees in the lake in this picture.

So the water came right up to the cabins.

This is the view into the house from the window:

 

The next cabin may have been in better shape since the doors were locked and there were “No Trespassing” signs.

This one seemed to be completely in the water:

  And this one was the fourth and last:

We went inside this one!

I also got a picture of the linoleum.  Pretty, huh?

There was a nice view from the window, too, I thought.

So, we continued down the road.

  And we came to what used to be the campground:

We figured this out from a remaining picnic table, fire pit, and several scattered (though fallen) barbecues.

  We also found this:

This is our chance! So what do you think family?  Shall we buy it?  We should really keep it in the family, don’t you think?

It’s a beautiful lake.

Maggie and I have it all figured out.  Diane can organize kids’ summer camps, Paul and Amy can run music camps, Kevin can have marriage retreats, Pete can make us a killer website, Dave can fix up all the cabins and make us new ones, Maggie and Rick can be our on-site managers, Dad can take care of the business nitty-gritty, and all the grandkids can be the employees!  (That last being the best part, of course!  They look like they need summer jobs, don’t they?)  It’s fun to dream!

We weren’t alone at the lake.  It seems to be a semi-popular place to fish and to ride four-wheelers.  Look at all the fish this kid caught! It also seems that it used to be fun to write on the trees.  We really liked the date on this one:

It says 1932!  We also found this other one on a different tree:

Mom!  What are you doing writing on trees?

Heh, heh.

We had a lot of fun wandering around a piece of our family history with the Gillespie family!

You may think the story ends there . . . but the next day Maggie ran into a gal at church who was from Beaver and knew all about Puffer Lake!  She invited Meg over to talk to her dad who used to go up to the lake all the time as a teenager!  He said that Neils actually owned the rights to three lakes in the area and that the cabins we had seen weren’t built by Neils himself but at the next lake over, Otter Lake, were two of his original cabins.  There also used to be a lodge at that lake but it was destroyed in the 1950s.  He said that three years ago there were some interested buyers who wanted to make a posh golf-course, etc. with the three lakes.  The buyers were Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, and Robert Redford!  We’re famous!  The hitch was that Beaver owns the water rights to Puffer Lake because they get the city’s power from that water.  That’s kind of important.  Beaver wouldn’t budge, so the three big shots abandoned their plan.

I’d love to see Otter Lake sometime, too.  But, I suppose for now, my romantic imaginings have been quite beautifully fulfilled.  What fun!