UEA weekend--a great staycation

Getting ready for Crimson trail

A beautiful leaf time of year

 Just to save me time and effort, I will copy/paste my letter to AJ about our family vacation.

It's been a great week.  Anytime we can take a family vacation makes it a great week.  I'm always ready for one when UEA comes around.  We purposely downsized our vacation since we've been having some significant expenses lately.  We spent one day here and 2 days down in Salt Lake doing fun things.  I think I told you that everyone got to choose one activity that they'd really like to do, so we had a great variety and had a lot of fun.

The kids on one of many cliffs (I mostly looked the other way)

 --the first day we went and hiked Crimson trail.  The plan was to hike White Pine but Ian had done that a couple of times and claimed that it would be brutally long.  Crimson trail ended up being really fun and beautiful.  A few pictures we took there were taken just for you.  We came back and went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner and then went home and got ready to go to the comedy show at the Eccles.  It was the older guy from "Trust us with your life".  Then a younger guy that was every bit as good as him if not more.  They did everything improv and I decided that you have to have some kind of amazing talent to be able to do that.  It was really hilarious.  If you get home and hear us quoting things that you don't understand, most likely they will be from that show.  When we got home, Alicia told me that that had been the most fun day ever.  (Ironic since she was the one complaining her brains out that we had to go on a hike.)

At the top.  Isaac was very excited about his snack bag the entire hike

NASA-here we come

The next morning after Dad finished helping a few people from the ward who were either in animal crisis or recommend crisis, we headed to SL for the rest of our vacation.  First on the schedule was to go do gocarts.  Ian will write you all about that cause he was so dang good at it and whooped us all.  Isaac on the other hand about go kicked out because he kept running into walls and there was no reverse on the cars.  He kept causing traffic jams.  But he did get better at it pretty quickly considering that the steering was pretty tight and the gas pedal caused extreme speed before you were even close to prepared.  It made a good memory and Ian is still walking around all high and mighty about it.

We were all loving the mandatory hairnets

We stayed in this size of a hotel room and Ian complained about the insuffcient size of our game table--yikes

 We then stuffed ourselves at the Sizzler and then went to see a movie.  "Alexander and the horrible bad horrendous........day".  It was funny and I had no regrets. (As with a lot of movies we spend half our life savings on.)  We then went to enjoy our hotel pool, basketball court, hot chocolate, and game table to play "Camelot" on.  The hotel had 2 bedrooms and a kitchen so we made our dinner there later that night.  We were sick of eating out and dad was giving his standard comment about how our spaghetti tastes so much better when we're on vacation.  For some strange reason.

Teesh and Frost--just being themselves at City Creek

We got up and did dad's chosen activity which was the SL temple and baptisms for the dead.  I toured temple square with Alicia and Isaac while the 3 of them went and did that.  It was a great experience for all of us.  We did have quite an airhead for our conference center tour though.  I'm pretty sure I knew more about how to get around that building than she did.  It was her first day though and she was freakin out a bit.

We watched the penquins for a long time

We then ate at the "Blue Lemon".  A place at City Creek that I've always wanted to try.  Yummy food.  (And yes, we ate a lot on this trip.)  I never really felt hungry and Isaac never stopped talking about being starving.  --still a bottomless pit.  We went and did the aquarium that Teesh talked about.  It was a lot better than I was expecting.  We saw a 4d shark movie that I was excited about and it ended up being really pretty irritating.  They would spray water in our faces at random times that didn't correlate with the movie, and we'd get puffs of air in our ears and bum massages also at random times.  It was all environmental and non "Jaws" like.

We got out of there without purchasing a single stuffed animal, (your sister is getting quite mature these days).  There was a big frown but no tears.

We then went to Fatcats, bought a few tokens for everyone to do video games (Isaac's activity of choice).  He got lucky on a few games and got a lot of tickets so he came out happy.  Then we hit Mcdonald's on our way home.  

AJ's response to this letter??--Why do we do everything that's fun now that he's gone.  I think every kid says this to their parents once they move out of the house.  It made me laugh.

It really was a fun weekend though--and it wasn't easy at all for Mario to get out of work.  I threw a sufficient enough tizzy fit about it and he loves me enough that he worked it out.  It's all about making good memories for us right now.