Cade's belated Valentine gift to me...

I won't go into the gory details of why his gift to me was belated, but I finally got my gift today.  He is such a good man.  I love him. 

I woke up this morning to a card and a whole pile full of Cadbury eggs -creme eggs, caramel filled eggs, the mini versions of both of the previous mentioned eggs, plus the mini-mini chocolate cadbury eggs (There goes that diet I've been working on!).   Plus there were donuts and chocolate milk for the kids for breakfast, so that I didn't have to make them anything (not that cold cereal is hard to make, but still...). 

Cade took all of the kids and dumped them off at school, and the one's that aren't in school went to his parents house (don't worry, they survived).  Cade and I went to breakfast at TJ's, a local cafe.  Then, to burn off our 320,303 calories from breakfast, we went gallivanting around the county.  Oh yes, the gallivanting definitely led to some calorie burning, read on. 

So we're driving "The Beast", aka our '87 2-wheel-drive Suburban, around in the desert, and we come upon a patch of sand.  I guess "The Beast" doesn't much care for sand, because he wasn't going to go through it.  We got stuck.  We got stuck for precisely 1 hour and 20 minutes. 

My man is so resourceful.  While I sat in the Suburban (perusing Facebook on my phone), he went trucking down the dirt road looking for something, anything, that could be shoved under the tire to get some traction.  What does he come back with?  He shows up with some logs, then some rocks, and lastly, a big water man-hole cover...yes, you read that right.  A man-hole cover.  Did I mention that we were in the middle of nowhere?  Hey, don't ask me! 

At this point I was starting to feel like this was something out of "Survivor Man".  I needed to see first-hand how a man-hole cover could be used to get out of rut like we were in!  Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I was starting to think of how we could survive the night in this place.  We could use pieces of the nearby yucca plant to weave a blanket, and then we could sleep under that big bush over there for shelter, and I wasn't too worried about food.  We had water, jerky, and Cade had brought his gun, so we could just track down that Mountain Lion that we knew existed from the evidence of it's giant paw prints scattered around the area. 

Okay, so we weren't really that far off the beaten path.  We still had cell service, and the highway was maybe 3 miles, if that.  But we really were stuck.   We dug (well, mostly Cade dug), we hunted for rocks, or wood (which is hard to come by in this part of the desert, believe it or not), or anything that could be shoved under the tire really.  Then Cade would shove that stuff under the tire, get in and rock the Suburban back and forth trying to get it to move, while Jen (yes, that's me) is jumping on the back bumper, trying to help it get some traction.  Ahhh, I can only imagine how ridiculous we looked.  Finally, finally we got it out!  I had faith. 

We spent the rest of the remainder of the day trekking around, exploring old decrepit houses (found a treasure that we brought home, too), shooting Cade's gun, eating lunch, and checking out some mine's around Silver Reef.  It was nice. 

A few more pictures from our day:

 *Did I mention that the man-hole cover did not work for getting un-stuck.  If you ever come across one, and you're stuck in some sand, don't bother hauling it back to the truck.  It won't do you any good. 
**I was also going to mention that I think Cade rather likes getting stuck.  He did say something, approximately 5 minutes before we got stuck, that led me to believe he enjoys a little hard labor, a challenge so to speak.