1 Skinny Orange Cone = $121

Story time:

Al loves camping. Sometimes I think he may love camping more than he loves me. But of course, he's very sweet and would never admit that.

But you should see our garage; he's got a whole entire wall lovingly devoted to his camping/backpacking equipment.

Since we've been married our purchases have included: camp chairs, a camp stove, Keens for both of us, a camel back, a very lightweight sleepingbag and pad, and a nice backpacking backpack for me. Not that I've really been backpacking before.

Basically we've already accepted we are slowly turning into earth people. Heaven forbid though, if he tries to get me to drive a Subaru, I draw the line there. Seriously. No offense to all you Subaru drivers out there. I'm sure you are great people.

Now I'm getting sidetracked. Onto the Story.

So, due to Ali's love of camping and the fact that it was fall break a couple weeks ago, we decided to go camping. Now, I would advise all you campers out there to actually figure out where you plan to camp before going there. We weren't that smart. We threw our new U of U camping chairs in the car, got in and drove to an unknown camping destination.

Note: Did you know a lot of campsites close in October?

Long story short we ended up at Jordanelle.

Now, for those of you who haven't been to this site, there are several campgrounds there. Also, there is a great big HUGE sign that says basically If-You-Have-An-RV-Or-Are-Camping-In-a-Tent-Go-This-Way with a great big arrow. After we drove past about four camp site signs that said "RV Camping," we finally came to a big sign that said "Car Camping." Unfortunately the road at this point had four skinny orange cones blocking off the path.

After double checking this was the only place we could put a tent, we shrugged our shoulders, moved over that skinny orange cone that was directly in our path, and drove on through.
*At this point I would like to point out that we were actually being considerate here in not camping out on the brush. Because we all know how much the park rangers hate THAT.

Anyway, we found outselves a nice little campspot, and figured we would be fine to camp there because of the dude in an RV chillin about 50 yards away from us. We were also comforted due to the cars that followed us in and put up their own tent. We knew we'd be fine camping there, right?

WRONG.

We woke up in the morning to a lovely BYEEEWWW sound.

Oh, hello po po.

Al went out there and argued with those "rent-a-cops" as he called them (apparently one of them didn't even have a gun.)

Turns out RV guy was the "camp post" thanks for doing your job and telling us we'd get in trouble for camping there, dude. We know you were there, we saw you creep into the bathrooms late at night.

Apparently there were tent spots mixed in with the spots labeled under the "RV Camping" sign. I'm still not quite sure how we were supposed to figure that out. And the other cars followed us in cause we didn't put the cone we moved back. Whoops.

Long story short, we are now down 121 bucks for our "minor infraction."

OH, and those kind little po pos even put up a sign for our leaving...

But you know what? Even though we had to pay a bunch of money, it was a great adventure! The moon that night could not have been prettier, and Ali even made me some dutch oven peach cobbler. SCORE!

Who wears the pants in this relationship?

To introduce us, I guess it's always important to start with our names.

Basically we have the most confusing names ever. Ali and Kourtney Mardanlou.

So I figure we'd address the problems most people seem to have with our names:

People aways wonder which of us is the boy, and which is the girl. Yes, Ali tends to be a girl name. But in our situation, Ali wears the pants.

Once people figure out that Ali is the man, pronunciation suddenly becomes a problem:
People like to say it like Ollie. You know,like Mohammed Ali. False. It is Ali, as in Alley, or Allie.

Generally Kourtney doesn't get butchered too much in the pronunciation, spelling is where it gets you. I was always so sad when I was younger because I could never find one of those name keychains that has my name spelled correctly.

Then there is our last name Mardanlou. Mardanlou. It's a mouthful. We hear Mardenlouw, Mardnlooo, Mardaanlouw...basically anything. A lot of times people just don't even try.

As I'm sure you are wondering, because the subject of how to say our last name is so interesting, It is pronounced Mar Dan Lou. Like, 3 first names put altogether. (And yes there is a superrrrr old lady in our ward name Mar, so it is a name.) Oh and Lou is like 'skip to my lou,' none of this louw stuff.

So for purposes of this blog, we will keep our names simple: Al and Kourt. Though I'm sure I will throw some Alis and Kourtneys in there, just to shake things up.