In June, we drove to Utah for my mom's family reunion. They rent out a house, aka mansion, large enough to accommodate everyone, which was 60 this year. Utah is always enjoyable, but I'll admit, I don't often look forward to it. Much like when we would visit Denver from Kansas, it can feel tiresome and like a business trip when you have so many friends and family that you'd like to see or demand that you see them and who whine at you if you don't see them but then would also never consider traveling to Colorado to see you. I won't name names. And then for me, I just get bored going to the same place all the time. Refer back to the first post of Santa Fe where I said I need to go new places and see/do new things. So for this Utah trip, I decided to not open our time up to whoever may want to see us, but we just picked a couple people that we would spend good time with rather than an hour or two, then spending our other weekend by seeing new Utah things like Bryce Canyon and Bears Ears. And even that ended up being complicated, but I still love you, Jon Maruji!
On Thursday, the day before the trip, my laundry and packing day, was the day scheduled to have our air conditioner replaced. Not the best day to have people working in my house for 12 hours, me needing to step over their stuff as I go back and forth from the laundry in the basement. Just one more thing hanging over my head as I needed to make a second round of last minute sleeping accommodation arrangements because Jon's life was crazy and he couldn't host us that weekend as we had planned. And the heat, which would've been there with or without replacing the unit, didn't help, either. But apparently it's a rule of life to replace household major appliances immediately before and after trips. First the washer and dryer, now the AC.
But I made it through my Thursday and enjoyed air conditioning when I went out for volleyball to blow off steam. Next morning we were on the road to Provo around 8 am and all was well. I love road trips and traveling. It's exciting, fun, relaxing, and calming all at the same time. We took a halfway stop at a park in Grand Junction, which had a beautiful backdrop of white cliffs.
When plans fell through with Jon for the weekend, I asked my friend Paul Brooks if we might be able to stay with him. Paul and I got into all sorts of mischief in the Singles' Ward some 10 years ago. We hid boiled eggs in Sharley's house while she was gone in retaliation to her duct taping my car. One of the eggs rolled down a vent when she tried to retrieve it...and then Paul and I spent many hours trying to get the egg back Sandlot-style. We even watched the movie to learn more tricks! We tapped a measuring cup to a stick, lowered a camera in to take pictures of where the egg was, got a shopvac to suck the egg out...probably more things I can't remember. We also spent a summer watching The Simpsons and trying to make everything we could think of root beer flavored. When he broke up with his girlfriend, my sister Becky, I was there to provide support and tell him it was a good thing. When he wanted to spend a ton of time going all out in creativity to try to win her back, I was there to tell him it was a bad idea, but help him anyway. And when I got dumped by my boyfriend, he and his roommate, Stuart, came to the hospital (I was participating in a medical study and had to be there overnight) with cases of IBC to be my breakup support. And we spent countless hours playing volleyball and ultimate frisbee. Anyway, he was unable to host us, but made arrangements for us to stay at his parent's house, which was beyond amazing for all of them to do. Paul and his wife, Sarah, came to the house and cooked dinner for us, then we played Make a Killing. It was so nice to catch up with Paul and meet Sarah. And Paul invited us to play ultimate frisbee with him and his group Saturday morning, so we did that after we first went to the wrong park and played ultimate frisbee with the wrong people. Hahaha!
Exhausted from running so much in direct sunlight, but it felt so good to play again!
{Thora, me, Paul}
I decided that the best thing to do after the heat and exertion of playing ultimate would be to hit BYU Creamery.
{Thora}
*I was engaging with my kids there...I was looking up what the hottest and coldest places on earth are because they asked!
{Dancy}
{Katie, Tommy, Samson}
{me}
Hooray for gummy bear toppings when you can't eat ice cream!
{Sam}
After ice cream, we drove to my aunt Suzanne's house where we stayed for the night. My kids were happy to pick back up with their cousins (who are actually mine, but I gave them to my kids because I'm not going to explain "first cousin once removed"). Shad and I were happy to just sit on a couch or help in the kitchen and not do much else because we were so sunbaked.
Somewhere I have a picture of Sexy Rexy doing this next to a sign in Ohio. Since he couldn't make it to this reunion, I did it for him.
After church on Sunday, we all changed clothes at Suzanne's, packed our stuff, grabbed granola bars and headed off to Maple Mountain Retreat in Mapleton. Somebody made a bad judgment call in giving Sam a chocolate and nut bar...okay, it was me.
Sunday was mostly spent running around and getting familiar with the mansion and everyone as they arrived. Monday morning we went bowling.
{Tommy}
{Dancy}
Sam's first time bowling.
{Thora}
When Thora wasn't bowling, she was sitting on my aunt Angie's lap. Angie and Suzanne both commented how Thora was just like they remember Lori at that age. Just a little deja vu.
Katie really didn't want to go bowling. I guess the last time we did, she won and felt like everyone was mad at her. It took a little bit of coaxing and then just force to get her to bowl again, but she got over her apprehension. As long as she didn't win or lose.
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