Deep Creek 2011

After flying over to Utah for my Grandpa's 90th birthday I got back on a plane and landed in DC with just enough time for Stan to pick me up from the airport and make the 3 hour drive up to Deep Creek Lake, MD. The Swinton side of the family has spent a week at this lake almost every summer since Stan was a kid. While it was traditionally just a family vacation it has now turned into the Swinton family reunion now that all the kids are grown up, married, and living all over the USA/ world.

Since living abroad, this was our families first Deep Creek in 3 years, and my first Deep Creek in 4 years. The last year Stan & the girls went without me as Thomas had just been born and we were living overseas . . . there was no way I was getting on a plane. It was a really BIG DEAL for us to go this year for two reasons (1) Stan's parents were just called to serve a 2 year mission at the Washington DC Temple. Stan's dad will be the temple President and his mom will serve as the temple Matron. They start in November so we will actually end up missing 3 years of Deep Creek since the summer will be over when they get released. (2) Since we live in Australia it is not really practical to spend the $2,000/ person air fair to get over to Washington DC every year....seriously, that is $10,000 for our family just to get there- not counting food or anything else. This year was made possible by Stan's parents sponsoring 3 tickets (Brian has a ton of frequent flier miles) and then we picked up the other two tickets. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

Deep Creek Lake can be summed up by the following bullet points:

• 7:00am water skiing runs (Seriously, how do I NOT have any pictures of this??)
• Boating

• Daily trips on the boat to the local creamery (yummy yummy ice cream)
• Hanging out
• Swimming, wake boarding, water skiing and tubing

• This year Papa Swinton rented a giant trampoline that floated on the water--Olivia said this was her favorite part of Deep Creek

• Girls craft shopping day/ boys babysat and took the kids to a movie
• Boys golf day (18 holes!)
• The usual flag down by the lake police...This time he gave us a warning but when he saw Stan had an Australian drivers license he took it down. The police man was excited, I think they must have a log of different countries back at the police base.
• Dinners cooked by grandma every night where all the families sat and talked in lawn chairs.

• This year we rented condos on the water all right next to each other (sometimes we have been broken up all over the lake). This facilitated really casual cousin play time and natural interactions with the other families. Plus you could just run into your house if a kid was having a melt down or needed to use the bathroom etc...
• In addition, this year we got a speed boat and a pontoon boat and then one of the other families rented their own boat so we had three boats which meant no one ever got left who wanted to tag along on a arrowhead run (breakfast on the water) or a ski run.