Trip to Utah

In March, we spent a week in Utah visiting my sister.  First stop, a trip to the fire station to see Uncle Brian at work.

My brother-in-law is pretty much the manliest man I know.  If you got up the courage to, say, go sky diving and you told him about it, he would probably tell you about when he used to parachute into the forest fires carrying a chainsaw.  And it would be true.  Now repeat that with every situation in your life you ever thought was exciting or a little bit dangerous.

But Brian tells you about it in a way that makes you believe you can be that awesome too, instead of thinking how lame it is that you didn't think to bring a chainsaw.

Driving the fire truck

We all tried on the coat.  My sister mentioned that she thought the coat was a little bit... well, it had a little bit of an odor.  Just so you know, firemen don't wash their coats.  Ever.  Well, I can't speak for all firemen, but the ones at this particular station in South Salt Lake do not.

Lillian and Jack

We got really lucky weather-wise.  The day after we arrived, there was a huge storm.  My sister lives on top of a mountain, so we got a lot of snow.  The next few days were really nice and so we had one snow day, one nice day to play in the snow, then all the snow melted and we could go outside with just jeans and short sleeves.

Tyler and Jack built a snow tunnel in one of the drifts.  I don't know if they made it all the way through before it collapsed, but it kept them busy for a long time.

We hung out at Thanksgiving Point for a bit.

Then comes the core reason we went up there, we went snowboarding at Brighton.

And, we only took one picture.  That's me in the purple jacket right in the middle.  I spent a long time trying to figure out how to maximize our snowboard experience.  I thought it would be fun if we went with Allison and Brian, and Allison and I could fall down a lot together, and Tyler and Brian could ski down the back side of the mountain, like in Aspen Extreme.  But, Allison couldn't find anyone to watch that whole gaggle of kids all day long.  So then we thought about going on separate days, but Tyler in another "aw,-that's-why-I-married-you," moment said he would rather spend time with me falling down and crying because I'm scared and tired and hurting than skiing black diamonds with Brian.

I liked snowboarding for approximately 2 hours.  Our teacher was named Sugar and he was great.  Under his tutelage, I could turn heel-side to toe-side and back without falling over.  I could make it down the bunny hill and stop at the bottom without falling down.  He felt confident that we could make it down an easy run without him, and cut us loose.  False.  I could not make it down without the afore-mentioned crying, falling down, hurting myself, almost running into trees, etc.  I attempted the run twice thinking that now that I knew where I was going, it might be easier.  False.  I called my sister Amy from the car while Tyler did a few more runs and told her that I was just plain done.

We hung out with our friend Rachel who used to live right around the corner, but then moved away, ruining my life.  Not really, but I miss her.

Allison has two dogs and a backyard that backs up into this hill.  We spent some quality time throwing the tennis ball for them.

On the way home, we stopped at the Glen Canyon Dam.  We did not take a dam tour, just some dam pictures.

We did other fun things like visit Tyler brother and his wife.  Why am I bad at documenting our family vacations?  I didn't get any pictures of me and Allison, or of my other nephews.  Or of the childrens' museum.  Oh, we went to Gilgal too... wait, I think I took pictures there.

There it is.  Because no trip to Utah is complete without seeing Joseph Smith's head on a sphinx.