Easy run near Martin's Cove in Wyoming. Average pace: 9:25. Weather at 6:00 am: 55°, 40% humidity, wind 3 S. This was the only run I managed to do while at the trek. I went up the day before the trek started to help get the kitchen part of the camp set up. I was woken up at 5:30 this morning after a not great night of sleep on the ground in a tent by some cows mooing loudly nearby. Since the kids weren't there yet and the first meal we were going to have to feed them was lunch that day, I figured it was my best opportunity to go for a run and as it turned out it was my only opportunity to go for a run while on the trek. I just ran 3 miles on a dirt road out to the highway and then back. I guess I'll use the rest of this blog entry and blog entries for the next few days to tell about the trek since I don't have any other running to report. After my run, I helped some more with getting things set up because we had done only some of the set up the night before and then helped prepare lunch for the kids. We had to feed 300 people at every meal. Our campsite was about 7 miles from the visitor's center and we served the lunch that day at the visitor's center. We did all the cooking (it was Sloppy Joe's) at the camp site and then trucked it all to the visitor's center. The kids and other adults arrived in 5 buses and we fed them lunch, then they got outfitted with their handcarts and then walked from the visitor's center to the campsite. We food committee people drove back to the campsite and prepared dinner so that it was ready for them when they arrived. They moved at a rate of about 3 miles in 2 hours with the handcarts. I guess it was slow going with the handcarts and then made a lot of stops and they tended to have pretty long stops. There are outhouses (I won't call them port-a-potties because they're not protable) at certain places along the trail and it would take a long time to get all 260 or so people taken care of at a stop. Also, along the way this day they did something called the women's pull. I don't know whether they went the boys away or just had them stand aside, but the idea was to simulate that the men were gone to be in the Mormon Batallion and so the women had to pull the handcarts. They made them pull the handcarts up a sandy hill and apparently some of them really struggled. I wasn't there to see this part because I was back at camp cooking. After dinner that night the kids had a square dance. I watched a little bit of it. My son who was on the trek danced for a little bit but then quit because he was with a group that he said didn't know what they were doing. But after he had sit out for a bit, he got pulled into a group that was a little better, and so then he enjoyed it. This is what the camp site looked like when we got there. You can see a bit of a tent in this photo, but we didn't have much set up at the point when I took this picture. The rest of my pictures will be more interesting. 
Here's a picture of some of the food committee people stirring the huge pans of sloppy joe meet getting ready for lunch. We didn't have the full kitchen set up at that point. You can see our refrigerator truck in the background. They called it the "refer truck," which is kind of funny. 
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