Here’s the thing! I know if you do any type of hiking, camping, picnicking, or tailgating, you’ve had to deal with a big bulky and damn heavy cooler, right? Imagine if you could comfortably carry ice-cold drinks on your back…And you could just reach back and grab one whenever YOU wanted? – Without having to STOP and UNLOAD!

The TrackPack Cooler is probably the most excited camping/hiking accessory that we’ve added to our equipment collection in a long time. I honestly don’t know how we’ve lived without it for so long. So long heavy bulky cooler days, I will never have to haul you around again, yippee!

$39.00! How can you not buy one at that price!?

TrackPack Coolers – It’s So Much Cooler!

For the 4th of July weekend we went camping with family members at Boulder Beach which is on Lake Mead. It was a fun weekend despite the sweltering heat, but we did find refuge floating on the lake on our inflatable rafts during the day.

The Family Review Network had asked me to review the Off! PowerPad Lamp so I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it out, and it worked great! We sat it on the picnic table and it provided light and kept the bugs away for the entire evening.

The power to repel is in the pad

• Protects an area up to 15x greater than citronella candles or buckets
• Relightable & refillable
• Lasts up to 4 hours per candle + pad combo

OFF! PowerPad Lamp & Lantern Giveaway: To enter for your chance to win a Off! PowerPad Lamp all you need to do is leave a comment on this post telling me about your favorite summer outdoor activity.

OFF! PowerPad Lamp & Lantern Giveaway Rules

1. Leave a comment on this post telling me about your favorite summer outdoor activity.
2. One winner will be drawn randomly from all the comments I receive.
3. Contest ends on Friday July 17, 2009 at 12:00 noon Pacific.
4. Winner will be contacted by email.
5. US addresses only please

This post was written for Family Review Network as part of a program by SC Johnson, who also supplied the product for review and giveaway.

OFF! PowerPad Lamp & Lantern Review and Giveaway-CLOSED

Red Rock Canyon

As we were setting up our tent, the bugs were trying to eat us alive, but nothing a little Off Wipe couldn’t cure. We got all set up, grabbed something to drink, including our chairs, and joined the rest of the Las Vegas burners to watch the fire spinners, and hula hoopers. There was such great talent there, and as usual Indigo stole the show with her incredible fire poi talent.

The best part of the night was the burn, and it was just beautiful. Much more beautiful than my point and shoot could ever capture in such a dark setting. The best of the shots are here on my Flickr set, including more pictures of the Hoover Dam Freeway Bypass Project. It’s coming right along and should be completed fairly soon.

PastaStock

We arrived around 3PM to the campground and secured one of that last spots available. The place was packed and the sites are real close to each other so they don’t offer much in the form of privacy, but we had a good time. We grilled pollo asada on the hibachi that we picked up at the Carniceria on the way out of town, and ate that with corn tortillas, salsa, and guacamole. It was delicious!

On Sunday morning Steve, Lola and Devin joined us for a little fun at Boulder Beach. It’s not the best beach by any means along Lake Mead, but it’s a very quick drive from Las Vegas if you want to hit the water on a quick day trip.

So for a 20 minute drive from our house, and $15.00 for two days of fun in the sun, it turned out to be a pretty good weekend. Our next trip is the Valley of Fire in a couple weeks. That is one of my most favorite places to camp in Southern Nevada.

Boulder Beach Campground – Lake Mead

The cameras are charging and I’m getting pretty excited about heading to the Springs Preserves tonight for the Las Vegas Earth Hour viewing party.

Earth Hour is the world’s first global election, between earth and global warming. So tonight at 8:30 you can vote earth by shutting off your lights for one hour, or you can vote global warming and leave them on. It’s up to you, but I’m voting earth.

The results of the election will be presented at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.

If you’re on Twitter and will be attending an event in your city the hashtag is #earthhour and then your location like #lv. Look for my tweets @JustJulie, and pictures on my TwitPics. I will post more pictures and video tomorrow.

Enjoy your night, and turn off those lights from 8:30-9:30PM and vote earth!

Earth Hour Las Vegas 2009

I haven’t heard the final tally yet on how much money was raised for clean drinking water, but I’m sure it was successful for them.

EDIT: I just got some figures on Twitter from @manyas

The table tops at the Revolution lounge were interactive and you could choose patterns to draw with. I had way too much fun playing with that thing.

Las Vegas Twestival

The White Lemuroid Possum is a very rare animal who lives 1000 meters up in the forest of Queensland, and it’s not been seen for nearly three years.

The temperatures in the region have risen up to 0.8 Celsius, and it only takes four or five hours of temperatures above 30 Celsius to kill the White Possum.

While you might say, “Big deal, it’s just a stupid possum who was highly vulnerable to the living conditions in the first place,” it’s still a big discovery towards the scientific evidence that global warming is a real and dangerous threat to mankind.

I REALLY don’t want to be blogging every other month about an animal that has become extinct due to man-made global warming, so please take it seriously and do your part to keep our world a green planet.

Source: News.com – Australia

[tags]White Possum, global warming, animals, extinction[/tags]

White Possum-First Victim of Global Warming

It’s a really expensive service, and the taller the palm trees are, the higher the cost goes up. We have 7 total in our yard, but the 5 that run along the wall in the backyard are the tallest. The other two are fairly small still and we can easily clean them with a step ladder.

Last week another random tree service guy knocked on our door and said he’d do them for $80, so we jumped at that offer. The only catch is, he didn’t do the removal, so we have them bundled on the side of the house and per our trash company we can take 5 bundles out per trash day. Doing the math in my head, we should have the bundles out of here by Thanksgiving. HA!

Here are the before and after pictures. Just look at how much more sunlight comes through to our backyard now! All I need now is some discount furniture for the patio, so we can enjoy the sunshine.

[tags]palm trees, palm tree cleaning[/tags]

Cleaning Palm Trees

Thursday when we woke up the wind had picked up and we were getting pelted with blowing sand. We decided to go out into the lake for a little swim and cruise around on our rafts. The wind got crazy out there on the lake, and our camp site was getting killed with sand. As we were paddling back to shore a gust of wind came up and pulled three out of four of our tent stakes right out of the ground, so our tent was flapping in the wind with all our stuff in it, including cell phones and digital cameras.

We paddled back as fast as we could and we were able to contain the tent when one of our rafts blew out in the lake. Michael swam out about 200 feet to rescue it, while I sat on the tent so it wouldn’t blow away for good. When he got back to shore we decided to just pack it up and go home and sleep in our bed.

Even though the trip was cut short, we enjoyed the time we did spend out there. Here are some pictures.

[tags]Lake Mead, Kingman Wash, tent camping[/tags]

Lake Mead Kingman Wash Camping Trip