Catching Up

I am behind on my posts again so I will note a quick run down on what we've been up to. The kids had Veteran's Day off so we went to the Quarry to do a bit of climbing. After doing a warm up on a route on School House Rock, we went over to the Alcove area to try some aid climbing. Someone had left a long rope hanging from one of the routes. It had been there for a while so we decided to take advantage of it sitting there to climb a difficult route there, using the sport climbing bolts to aid up it. That way, if we run into a problem, we could use their rope to bail off the route and we would not have to leave any gear.

Christian was able to get up without too much difficulty with the help of a stick clip. And then we did some jumar practice up on the fixed rope. Unfortunately, the rope was pretty stretchy so that made it extra difficult to ascend the free hanging rope. Christian and Emily made it up. Caitlyn made it most of the way up but I could not even get off the ground. I just could not get the hang of how to do it.

It was pretty frustrating. I guess a lot of people had the day off as well and the place was full of climbers.
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Christian and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary this past weekend. We've been together for a total of 26 years! Well "celebrated" is kind of an overstatement. It's not like we could go off and spend time away from the kids or anything. But since we wanted to go do something and since UCR was having their big homecoming party that weekend so we knew that we had to get out of town.

We decided to go out to the Lucerne Limestone Quarry. When we got there, we were pretty worried as the thermometer on the car showed that although it was mid morning, it was still super cold. But when we parked and stood out in the sun, it wasn't too bad.

We proceeded to our first climb on the Main Wall which is supposed to be low angle slab (5.6) called Wind Tunnel. We found that it was pretty steep with very thin holds and sometimes, those holds would just break off!

Caitlyn decided that she did not really want to climb this route. It was supposed to be the easiest route here so she ended up just climbing around and making her own routes with her sister.

We moved on to the Moderate Wall. The girls stayed where they were to play while Christian and I climbed Cold Shoulder (5.7) and Limestone Louie (5.8). Cold Shoulder was up mostly up the arete with some dirty awkward cracks.

Limestone Louie was kind of fun though, so after we were done, we went to get Emily to try it. It is right up her alley. 

We still had some time left in the day but we wanted to make sure that we were able to find a good camping spot. We have had too much trouble in the recent past with just bailing and going home. We found a good spot on the other side of the quarry. It was not exactly nice as lots of people go there to camp and shoot. It was littered with bullet shells and broken glass and stuff but it was isolated and shielded from some of the other noise out in Lucerne. Apparently, there is a dry lake bed there that people congregate at to shoot off rockets. There were hundreds of people out there.

We were able to make a campfire...something we have not had in quite a while since a lot of places don't allow them anymore.

That was nice, especially since it was pretty chilly out there. The kids had some fun writing with light. We thought that we would end up having a long night ahead of us since it gets dark quickly these days and it will be cold out but the fire kept us out until pretty late, so when we finally ran out of wood, it was time to turn in for the night anyway. Everyone was tired.

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Caitlyn had Thursday and Friday off for parent teacher conference. She is doing great in school so there wasn't much for us to discuss. We got to see some of her work and visit with her teacher.  Emily got her grades for the quarter a couple of weeks ago, she seems to be doing a little better in keeping up with her math homework but still needs some serious work in her english homework. I'd like to say that she has learned her lesson and is being more responsible with her time this year but it is still a daily battle. 

We spent most of Friday getting ready for Thanksgiving break. We are heading back to Yosemite!