Red Butte Gardens minus the gardens

We went to Red Butte Gardens on a free admission day last fall!
There are not really any pictures of the gardens, but lots of this fam :)

When I am older and aloner I am retiring to Mendocino!

My family decided to have a family reunion of sorts back in July and so we drove out to California with all our camping gear and stuff to spend a few days at the beach. Now let me clarify...I drove the kids out to Cali and Jim flew out that night. Not my first 10.5 hr drive with them alone and certainly not my last! We went to the Mendocino/Glass Beach area of Northern California....the COLD ocean, even in the middle of summer! Needless to say, we had some fun, I remembered that I will do anything else in the world to avoid camping ever again, but the kids liked it. Except for the part where it was really cold, and DIRTY! and wet and we didn't bring enough clothes....and I don't like campfire smoke, and..... don't get me started :) but I wouldn't mind living in the town of Mendocino when I'm old, it's beautiful and right there at the ocean and just a cool place.

20th HS Reunion in NM

We took a couple other road trips in July. Including one down to New Mexico for Jim's 20th High School Reunion! We had a great visit with his family that lives in Albuquerque and met a bunch of his HS friends. One guy brought the Oscar he won for work on that "Benjamin Button" movie and let everyone take pictures with it. :)

4th of July Weekend (Part 2)

Next on our trip we of course had to go see the school!

1ST up we ran around the Snow building.

I showed the kids where I had many a humanities and music class.

Next we went to the Hart Gym

Good ol' Thor :)

Found these plaques of my old friend from my freshman yr.

Hall of Famer!!

Checked out our old haunts....

The ever craptacular Riviera apts.

The CAVE!!!!

The new and improved Craigo's....the pizza and breadsticks tasted the same :) Yummy!

Our friends old apts....Ahh Royal Crest and the Bunkhouse

We also toured around the new (to us) gardens.... it was fun but it was getting hot and we wanted to get home in time to watch the Thanksgiving Pt fireworks from our front yard...

All in all, a fun trip!

It was nice to go back and visit and be very happy we are done with school!

4th of July Weekend (Part 1)

July started with a long weekend for us and we wanted to make the most of it!

We kept talking about taking a little trip somewhere but it was really hot and we had limited funds and everywhere we talked about was either hotter or too expensive.

At the last minute Jim looked up some hotels and we were off on a whirlwind adventure north to the land of our meeting.....

REXBURG, IDAHO

We left kind of later in the afternoon and drove to Idaho Falls

{Idaho Falls, Idaho LDS Temple}

We took a scenic drive around town trying to remember where stuff was and seeing what was new in the last 15 yrs or so since we had been there last...

We swam in the hotel pool even though it was about to rain and cold and windy....and remembered how un-fun it is to travel with our kids :)

Everyone was getting ready for the 4th so we saw a lot of people camped out along the street for a parade and there were early fireworks that night as well.

The next morning we headed to Rexburg and made plans to meet up with Jim's bro Nathan who was living there at the time.

{Rexburg, Idaho LDS Temple}
This wasn't there when we were in school!

This was!! :)


We arrived just in time to catch the Rexburg 4th of July parade and found Nathan in the crowd. I love a good small town parade! They are so patriotic and festive! We got lots of candy thrown to us and even school lunch size chocolate milk cartons from one of the floats :)

Next we drove around Rexburg checking out the changes and boring our kids to tears with stories....

wow.

I forgot how much time I used to spend tweaking my blog.... :)

the REAL rest of June...

My brother and his family came to visit and one of the big highlights was riding the TRAX up to Downtown Salt Lake City...

the travellers
it was really fun when we came back at the 5 o'clock commute and the train was
packed and I had 4 kids and a double stroller to manage :)
THANKS REX for all your help! And for coming to visit!

this kid wouldn't look at me...but he loved the train!

We went up to Temple Square and took the real tour for Lucy's birthday

ahhh Tourists!

What I did on my Fall vacation

We had 5 glorious days off for Fall Break and the weather was perfect so we turned it into a great "Stay-cation" and became tourists about town.

We started out Thursday at Boondocks. Mini-Golf, arcade games, really expensive hamburgers and Go-Karts. Sorry no pictures of go-karts. We were too busy racing around the track, or in my case, trying to stay ahead of the grandma in the next kart. Who knew old ladies were so competitive?

This girl slept through almost the whole trip.

Friday, we went downtown

and discovered Jim's new favorite restaurant.Brazilian Grill.
You know one of those places with the big salad bar and meat is brought around on skewers. yummy!
The dessert was really delish too!

Saturday we finally made it to the ZOO.

There was a lot of pointing going on...

We saw a few animals...

but then Jake kept getting attacked by wild creatures...

and Sam had to tame them...

We wrapped up the vacation with the Barnyard Boo at Thanksgiving Pt. I was a little tired of picture taking so...

Overall we had a great time together and made lots of fun memories to keep us warm as the temperature dips and we start hermitting inside for the long bleak winter.

OK maybe it won't be such a bad winter :) Let's try to end on a positive note :)

Postcards from Alpine Loop

Sunday after Conference we took a drive up the canyon to see the changing leaves. We had heard the Alpine Loop was the best place to see the color and it did not disappoint. Apparently everyone else knew it was probably 1 of the last times to see the leaves before everything is covered in snow because there was a ton of people. And as you can see in some of the pics, because of the storm we had all weekend, there is already snow on the mountain tops. Oh joy! (in a very sarcastic tone) See if you can spot us in any of the pics(oh that's right, you can't! I was taking most of the photos and the kids were either asleep or it was too cold to jump out and take pics.)

PS did you notice all 3 posts today start with "Sunday"?

Still True Blue

Even though we went a week ago the excitement hasn't worn off. We got tickets to the BYU/UCLA grudge match which turned into a romp by BYU. We killed 'em 59 to ZIP! A thorough whipping!

This guy was EX-CIT-ED!!

Our seats were way up at the last row. The top of the stadium. WAY UP THERE!

I had just gotten over the small heart attack I was having from the hike down from parking by the MTC field when we got to the mountain climb up to our seats. It was a workout and we were in flip flops. Oh well, what can we say, We are fans!!

**Game day notes from today's game against Wyoming**
BYU blew them away 44-0!!