The wife and I were driving along a winding scenic road in the rugged high mountains of southern Utah. The ride through forests of juniper, punctuated with red-rock ridges, bluffs, towers, and canyons carved through time by wind and water, was breathtaking. The brilliant blue sky, interrupted with an occasional white cloud, the fluffy kind, arched overhead. Judging from the sun approaching its zenith, it was late morning. The air at this elevation was delightfully cool. A beautiful day.
The narrow blacktop snaked its way through the landscape. This was pristine country. Except for the road we were traveling on, there were no obvious signs of civilization to be seen for miles in any direction. We did not pass any other vehicles. The road through this stretch had no signs, no pavement markings, no guardrails. The guardrails, in retrospect, would have seemed to be a desirable nicety if not an outright necessity.
My wife was driving the car. That was an odd curiosity because on road trips I was always the driver.
Her father was in the back seat. I remember that fact simply because he cautioned her to slow down as we began our descent from the relatively flat plateau we had been driving on. The road started to become treacherous as it headed down the mountainside, but she seemed not to heed his warning.
We rounded curves that hugged the side of the mountain. Just beyond the side of the road, the terrain in places fell away for thousands of feet. At times we were climbing steep hills. Once crested, the car picked up speed as we descended the other side. More curves. Switchbacks. More ups and downs. For whatever reason, she seemed bent on getting us to our destination in somewhat of a hurry. A ride on a roller coaster would have seemed tame in comparison.
She headed a bit too fast into a lengthy curve to the right, and the rear wheels were sliding dangerously close to the precipitous edge. She gunned the engine to help the front wheels pull the vehicle back onto the pavement. The outcome appeared dubious.
And that's when I awoke, safe in my comfortable bed, and realized that it had all been a dream.
Showing posts with label Road trips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Road trips. Show all posts
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Taking Camilla to college
Journal excerpts from ten years ago recounting a family trip that we (Mary, Eliza, Camilla, Anna, Claudia, and I) took to Washington, D.C., and to Virginia, where we deposited Camilla at Southern Virginia College (now Southern Virginia University) in Buena Vista.
Friday, August 18, 2000
Utah, Texas, Maryland, Virginia
Our adventure began at 7:00 this morning as Cade and Michael each drove three of us to the airport. We checked Camilla's luggage, got our boarding passes, and went to the gate to wait. While there we saw Monte and Ann Stewart, who were on their way to their son's wedding reception in Atlanta and were on our same flight to Houston. We had not seen them since they returned from presiding over the Georgia Atlanta Mission in 1997 and had missed the Orem reception last Saturday evening because we had been busy with Carrie Bertasso's wedding luncheon and with getting Camilla ready to go off to school.
At 8:30 our Continental flight left on time for Houston. The ticket lady at the gate used to live in Monte and Ann's ward and had upgraded them to first class. Just as we were boarding, Monte kindly gave his seat to Claudia and came back to sit with Mary, Eliza, and me. Camilla and Anna were in other rows further back. Just before boarding, I called Rich Hogan in Houston to tell him we'd be laying over there for three hours. He said he'd try to come to the airport to visit us but either missed us or was unable to come.
We were served breakfast on our three-hour flight to Houston, bought lunch during our three-hour layover, and had dinner on our three-hour flight to Baltimore. We were late leaving Houston and late arriving in Baltimore. It was just before dark as we touched down and had been raining. Our luggage had come on an earlier flight and was already waiting for us. Too bad we hadn't come with it.
We picked up our rental car, a Plymouth Voyager, and drove south on I–95, west and south on I–495 (past the Washington D.C. Temple that looms above the trees like it's floating in the air), and east on I–66 to our Comfort Inn in the Ballston area of Arlington. A long day of travel.
Saturday, August 19, 2000
Virginia, District of Columbia
We ate our continental breakfast at the motel and around 9:30 or so walked about six blocks to the Metro station (the Ballston stop on the orange line) and took the Metro into Washington D.C. We disembarked at the Smithsonian station, which put us right on the National Mall. It cost us $13.20 for six round-trip fares.
Our first stop along the Mall was the Smithsonian Museum of American History, where we saw an original sun stone from the Nauvoo Temple, the restoration project on the Star Spangled Banner (the giant flag that flew over Baltimore's Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words to what is now our national anthem), a large statue of George Washington in a Roman toga, and an extensive exhibit on our country's First Ladies.
We crossed to the other side of the Mall to catch a noon performance tour of Piano 300, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the piano. We saw the very first pianoforte built in 1700 and numerous other pianos from the intervening years. Mari Paz, a Cuban lady who in Mexico City became an accomplished pianist, was our delightful tour guide and played a variety of songs from different eras and countries on the various pianos, ending on a rhinestone-studded piano built for Liberace. We thoroughly enjoyed this exhibit.
We returned to the Main Street Cafes, the cafeteria in the basement level of the American History Museum, and ate outside in view of the Washington Monument. The weather all day was very pleasant, partly cloudy, a gentle breeze, ideal for an August day. We wandered through a little more of the museum, visiting the pop culture exhibit, where we saw the Ruby Slippers Judy Garland wore in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz and a quilt exhibit. We shopped in the museum bookstore.
Next we crossed the Mall again and walked clear down toward the U.S. Capitol to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where we saw the Wright Brothers' original plane they flew at Kitty Hawk, touched a piece of the moon, viewed Mission to MIR in the IMAX theater (the first time any of us except Anna had seen an IMAX presentation), saw the Spirit of St. Louis that first crossed the Atlantic, and walked by numerous other planes and rockets and capsules that illustrate the history of flight during this past marvelous century.
We were tired of walking by now and should reasonably have called it a day but decided to walk down to the Washington Monument and then beyond clear down to the Lincoln Memorial. From the Washington Monument, you can see the U.S. Capitol to the east, the White House to the north, and the Lincoln Memorial to the west. From the Lincoln Memorial, which I personally find one of the most inspirational sites in Washington, we visited the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Then walk, walk, walk some more along 23rd Street to I Street, past the Department of State and George Washington University, to catch the Metro at the Foggy Bottom station and return to Virginia. Our walking was not quite through yet: we still had to walk the eight blocks from the Ballston station to our Comfort Inn. We estimate we may have walked 5 miles today. We drove in the minivan to find a place to eat and did so at a place called Diner 29.
Sunday, August 20, 2000
Virginia
We awoke early, ate breakfast in the motel, and took off for Lynchburg. It was a beautiful three-hour drive, first west along I–66 and mostly south on U.S. 29, which was marked as the Seminole Trail, the 29th Infantry Memorial Highway, and for part of the way the James Madison Highway. The only major city we passed was Charlottesville.
In Lynchburg we stopped at a Hardee's for lunch, using the occasion to teach Mary what the phrase "Ox in the mire" meant. Then we drove to church to attend meetings in the Lynchburg First Ward, where we were warmly welcomed. Larry Young's brother, Roger, is the bishop. His wife, Sue, is the gospel doctrine teacher in Sunday School. Camilla met Josh Lloyd, who will also be a freshman at Southern Virginia College.
We went to the Youngs' home afterward for dinner and spent several delightful hours visiting with them. They have five children, an older married daughter who lives in Layton and who is expecting their third grandchild, a son returning from the Brazil Recife Mission in less than three weeks, a 17-year-old Eric, a 15-year-old Brett, and an 11-year-old Jenny.
We went and found our Comfort Inn, where the four girls stayed in one room and Claudia and I in another. We called several people back home: Claudia in Bountiful (Kay was sustained today as first counselor in the 36th Ward bishopric), Shauna in Layton (Michael left today for a week in Boston), Rebecca in Layton (she returned home yesterday from girls camp), Rachael in Kansas City, and Talmage and Carisa's answering machine in Bountiful.
Monday, August 21, 2000
Virginia
Our Comfort Inn served a full hot breakfast, which we weren't overly impressed with. We took our time getting going and even watched most of the musical Oklahoma! on TV, which Camilla had never seen before.
We drove east from Lynchburg on U.S. 460, somewhere between 20 or 30 miles, to Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, the site where Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee ended the Civil War in April 1865.
We then drove back to Lynchburg, ate lunch at a Subway, filled the car with gas (at $1.29 a gallon, the cheapest we'd seen on the trip), and followed U.S. 501, a winding, scenic highway over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Buena Vista.
Southern Virginia College is situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a prominent hill overlooking the town of Buena Vista. We stopped at Main Hall, where Camilla will be living on the fourth floor. It was built in the late 1800s as a resort hotel and in 1900 was purchased by Southern Virginia Seminary, a two-year women's college. A few years ago the failing seminary was purchased by a group of eastern LDS businessmen and turned it into what is now Southern Virginia College.
We wandered around the campus and then drove up and down the streets of Buena Vista, trying to get a feel for the town of 6,000-some people.
We drove over to Lexington, about six miles away, at the intersection of I–64 and I–81, and found the Comfort Inn that will be our home for the next three nights. We ate at the Shoney's restaurant next door.
Tuesday, August 22, 2000
Virginia
Another slow start. Breakfast at this motel is served until 10:30, and we didn't go until the final half hour.
A little before noon we headed north through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley on I–81 and east on I–64 to Shenandoah National Park. We drove about 25 miles along the Skyline Drive, penetrating maybe a fourth of the way along the 105-mile length of the park. Anna and Eliza hiked nearly two miles along the Appalachian Trail, which winds 1,000-plus miles from Georgia to Maine. The rest of us drove to the next parking area that intersected with the trail, and I hiked back toward Anna and Eliza while Claudia, Camilla, and Mary waited in the car.
At Loft Mountain Wayside we stopped for milkshakes, bought postcards and CDs, and took a bathroom break. Then we retraced our route back out of the park and continued south on the Blue Ridge Parkway until it intersected with U.S. 60, which we took the final few miles into Buena Vista. We went to the SVC bookstore, now called the Light on the Hill Bookstore, to look for sweatshirts. Eliza and Mary bought one to share.
We returned to Lexington, ate at Applebee's, and returned to our motel.
Wednesday, August 23, 2000
Virginia
Today we deposited Camilla at Southern Virginia College. She is in room 435 on the top floor of the Main Building. We checked her in starting about 10:30 and hauled all her stuff up the stairs. Then we drove back to the Walmart in Lexington to shop for stuff she still needed (pillows, garbage can, hangers, toiletries, etc.) and ate lunch at the Burger King. We took her stuff to her room and returned to the K–Mart in Lexington for the second list of stuff we thought of (a fan, laundry detergent, more hangers, etc.) before returning to the school.
We ate dinner with Camilla in the school cafeteria. We also sat with Emily, one of her roommates, and Emily's mother. Camilla has three roommates: Emily from Tennessee, Rheanna from Iowa, and Elizabeth from Rhode Island. Emily is a sophomore; the other three are freshmen.
Camilla came back with us to the motel in Lexington to watch the final two-hour episode of Survivor on TV. After it was over, we drove her the six miles back to Buena Vista to sleep her first night in her dorm room.
Thursday, August 24, 2000
Virginia, Maryland
After three days in the same Comfort Inn, we got up, had breakfast, packed our belongings, and checked out. We drove to Buena Vista, found the post office, and mailed 15 postcards. We then drove up to Southern Virginia College to see if we could find Camilla, which we did in the ballroom. We ate lunch with her in the cafeteria, went up to her room a final time, took pictures, and said our good-byes. A few tears were shed. And we were gone.
After stopping for gas and at the Subway for Anna and Mary to get their lunch (they did not eat with us in the cafeteria), we started our return to the Washington D.C. area. We headed north on I–81 until we turned east on U.S. 211 to Shenandoah National Park. Tuesday we had driven the bottom fourth of the park. Today we drove the top fourth. Then we continued east on I–66 to the Alexandria area.
When we got to our Comfort Inn in Ballston, the same one we stayed in our first two nights, the area was without power and we were unable to check in. As we sat waiting in the car in the parking lot, we wondered what it would take to go home a day early (Friday morning instead of Saturday morning). With Camilla safely deposited and all of us beginning to feel travel weary (there is only so much gorgeous scenery and fascinating history we can assimilate in a week), we decided anything else was anticlimactic.
We made various calls on the cell phone and were able to change our airplane tickets and make all the arrangements. The $75 per ticket change fee, totaling $375 for the five of us, was nearly canceled out by our turning the car in a day earlier, a day's less food and other expenses, and canceling our motel reservations for tonight and tomorrow night. Mary Ann Holt had arranged for a friend to give us a tour of the U.S. Capitol tomorrow, and we finally reached Mary Ann on the phone to cancel that also.
We ate dinner at the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) in Ballston, drove to Baltimore, turned in our rental car, and beginning about 10:00 spent all night waiting in the airport for our 6:30 flight to Houston. It was like having a seven- or eight-hour layover. Not a good idea.
Friday, August 25, 2000
Maryland, Texas, Utah
We thought morning would never come as we waited all night in the freezing airport. We boarded our plane at about 6:00 and flew to Houston. This time we were not as scattered throughout the plane: Claudia and I were together on one row, and Anna, Eliza, and Mary were together on another. Other than eating the little breakfast they served on the plane, I think most of us pretty much slept the whole three-hour flight.
Our layover this time in Houston was only a little over an hour, and then we flew home to Utah, arriving in the Salt Lake airport just before noon. Rebecca and Shauna came in their cars to pick us up. It had been a wonderful week, but we were glad to be home. (The flight from Houston to Salt Lake was over booked, probably because of us, and they were offering a $200 travel credit plus a flight later in the afternoon for anyone who would give up his seat. I was interested, but after waiting all night in the Baltimore airport no one else would even think of it, so we all came on home.)
In the afternoon Mom and I drove Anna back to Ephraim and saw the house at 200 South Main Street, where she is living with Bethany and Rebekah Youngs. Claudia actually stayed awake the entire return trip to keep me awake.
This morning while waiting for our flight home I wrote a letter to Camilla:
Friday, August 18, 2000
Utah, Texas, Maryland, Virginia
Our adventure began at 7:00 this morning as Cade and Michael each drove three of us to the airport. We checked Camilla's luggage, got our boarding passes, and went to the gate to wait. While there we saw Monte and Ann Stewart, who were on their way to their son's wedding reception in Atlanta and were on our same flight to Houston. We had not seen them since they returned from presiding over the Georgia Atlanta Mission in 1997 and had missed the Orem reception last Saturday evening because we had been busy with Carrie Bertasso's wedding luncheon and with getting Camilla ready to go off to school.
At 8:30 our Continental flight left on time for Houston. The ticket lady at the gate used to live in Monte and Ann's ward and had upgraded them to first class. Just as we were boarding, Monte kindly gave his seat to Claudia and came back to sit with Mary, Eliza, and me. Camilla and Anna were in other rows further back. Just before boarding, I called Rich Hogan in Houston to tell him we'd be laying over there for three hours. He said he'd try to come to the airport to visit us but either missed us or was unable to come.
We were served breakfast on our three-hour flight to Houston, bought lunch during our three-hour layover, and had dinner on our three-hour flight to Baltimore. We were late leaving Houston and late arriving in Baltimore. It was just before dark as we touched down and had been raining. Our luggage had come on an earlier flight and was already waiting for us. Too bad we hadn't come with it.
We picked up our rental car, a Plymouth Voyager, and drove south on I–95, west and south on I–495 (past the Washington D.C. Temple that looms above the trees like it's floating in the air), and east on I–66 to our Comfort Inn in the Ballston area of Arlington. A long day of travel.
Saturday, August 19, 2000
Virginia, District of Columbia
We ate our continental breakfast at the motel and around 9:30 or so walked about six blocks to the Metro station (the Ballston stop on the orange line) and took the Metro into Washington D.C. We disembarked at the Smithsonian station, which put us right on the National Mall. It cost us $13.20 for six round-trip fares.
Our first stop along the Mall was the Smithsonian Museum of American History, where we saw an original sun stone from the Nauvoo Temple, the restoration project on the Star Spangled Banner (the giant flag that flew over Baltimore's Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words to what is now our national anthem), a large statue of George Washington in a Roman toga, and an extensive exhibit on our country's First Ladies.
We crossed to the other side of the Mall to catch a noon performance tour of Piano 300, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the piano. We saw the very first pianoforte built in 1700 and numerous other pianos from the intervening years. Mari Paz, a Cuban lady who in Mexico City became an accomplished pianist, was our delightful tour guide and played a variety of songs from different eras and countries on the various pianos, ending on a rhinestone-studded piano built for Liberace. We thoroughly enjoyed this exhibit.
We returned to the Main Street Cafes, the cafeteria in the basement level of the American History Museum, and ate outside in view of the Washington Monument. The weather all day was very pleasant, partly cloudy, a gentle breeze, ideal for an August day. We wandered through a little more of the museum, visiting the pop culture exhibit, where we saw the Ruby Slippers Judy Garland wore in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz and a quilt exhibit. We shopped in the museum bookstore.
Next we crossed the Mall again and walked clear down toward the U.S. Capitol to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where we saw the Wright Brothers' original plane they flew at Kitty Hawk, touched a piece of the moon, viewed Mission to MIR in the IMAX theater (the first time any of us except Anna had seen an IMAX presentation), saw the Spirit of St. Louis that first crossed the Atlantic, and walked by numerous other planes and rockets and capsules that illustrate the history of flight during this past marvelous century.
We were tired of walking by now and should reasonably have called it a day but decided to walk down to the Washington Monument and then beyond clear down to the Lincoln Memorial. From the Washington Monument, you can see the U.S. Capitol to the east, the White House to the north, and the Lincoln Memorial to the west. From the Lincoln Memorial, which I personally find one of the most inspirational sites in Washington, we visited the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Then walk, walk, walk some more along 23rd Street to I Street, past the Department of State and George Washington University, to catch the Metro at the Foggy Bottom station and return to Virginia. Our walking was not quite through yet: we still had to walk the eight blocks from the Ballston station to our Comfort Inn. We estimate we may have walked 5 miles today. We drove in the minivan to find a place to eat and did so at a place called Diner 29.
Sunday, August 20, 2000
Virginia
We awoke early, ate breakfast in the motel, and took off for Lynchburg. It was a beautiful three-hour drive, first west along I–66 and mostly south on U.S. 29, which was marked as the Seminole Trail, the 29th Infantry Memorial Highway, and for part of the way the James Madison Highway. The only major city we passed was Charlottesville.
In Lynchburg we stopped at a Hardee's for lunch, using the occasion to teach Mary what the phrase "Ox in the mire" meant. Then we drove to church to attend meetings in the Lynchburg First Ward, where we were warmly welcomed. Larry Young's brother, Roger, is the bishop. His wife, Sue, is the gospel doctrine teacher in Sunday School. Camilla met Josh Lloyd, who will also be a freshman at Southern Virginia College.
We went to the Youngs' home afterward for dinner and spent several delightful hours visiting with them. They have five children, an older married daughter who lives in Layton and who is expecting their third grandchild, a son returning from the Brazil Recife Mission in less than three weeks, a 17-year-old Eric, a 15-year-old Brett, and an 11-year-old Jenny.
We went and found our Comfort Inn, where the four girls stayed in one room and Claudia and I in another. We called several people back home: Claudia in Bountiful (Kay was sustained today as first counselor in the 36th Ward bishopric), Shauna in Layton (Michael left today for a week in Boston), Rebecca in Layton (she returned home yesterday from girls camp), Rachael in Kansas City, and Talmage and Carisa's answering machine in Bountiful.
Monday, August 21, 2000
Virginia
Our Comfort Inn served a full hot breakfast, which we weren't overly impressed with. We took our time getting going and even watched most of the musical Oklahoma! on TV, which Camilla had never seen before.
We drove east from Lynchburg on U.S. 460, somewhere between 20 or 30 miles, to Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, the site where Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee ended the Civil War in April 1865.
We then drove back to Lynchburg, ate lunch at a Subway, filled the car with gas (at $1.29 a gallon, the cheapest we'd seen on the trip), and followed U.S. 501, a winding, scenic highway over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Buena Vista.
Southern Virginia College is situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a prominent hill overlooking the town of Buena Vista. We stopped at Main Hall, where Camilla will be living on the fourth floor. It was built in the late 1800s as a resort hotel and in 1900 was purchased by Southern Virginia Seminary, a two-year women's college. A few years ago the failing seminary was purchased by a group of eastern LDS businessmen and turned it into what is now Southern Virginia College.
We wandered around the campus and then drove up and down the streets of Buena Vista, trying to get a feel for the town of 6,000-some people.
We drove over to Lexington, about six miles away, at the intersection of I–64 and I–81, and found the Comfort Inn that will be our home for the next three nights. We ate at the Shoney's restaurant next door.
Tuesday, August 22, 2000
Virginia
Another slow start. Breakfast at this motel is served until 10:30, and we didn't go until the final half hour.
A little before noon we headed north through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley on I–81 and east on I–64 to Shenandoah National Park. We drove about 25 miles along the Skyline Drive, penetrating maybe a fourth of the way along the 105-mile length of the park. Anna and Eliza hiked nearly two miles along the Appalachian Trail, which winds 1,000-plus miles from Georgia to Maine. The rest of us drove to the next parking area that intersected with the trail, and I hiked back toward Anna and Eliza while Claudia, Camilla, and Mary waited in the car.
At Loft Mountain Wayside we stopped for milkshakes, bought postcards and CDs, and took a bathroom break. Then we retraced our route back out of the park and continued south on the Blue Ridge Parkway until it intersected with U.S. 60, which we took the final few miles into Buena Vista. We went to the SVC bookstore, now called the Light on the Hill Bookstore, to look for sweatshirts. Eliza and Mary bought one to share.
We returned to Lexington, ate at Applebee's, and returned to our motel.
Wednesday, August 23, 2000
Virginia
Today we deposited Camilla at Southern Virginia College. She is in room 435 on the top floor of the Main Building. We checked her in starting about 10:30 and hauled all her stuff up the stairs. Then we drove back to the Walmart in Lexington to shop for stuff she still needed (pillows, garbage can, hangers, toiletries, etc.) and ate lunch at the Burger King. We took her stuff to her room and returned to the K–Mart in Lexington for the second list of stuff we thought of (a fan, laundry detergent, more hangers, etc.) before returning to the school.
We ate dinner with Camilla in the school cafeteria. We also sat with Emily, one of her roommates, and Emily's mother. Camilla has three roommates: Emily from Tennessee, Rheanna from Iowa, and Elizabeth from Rhode Island. Emily is a sophomore; the other three are freshmen.
Camilla came back with us to the motel in Lexington to watch the final two-hour episode of Survivor on TV. After it was over, we drove her the six miles back to Buena Vista to sleep her first night in her dorm room.
Thursday, August 24, 2000
Virginia, Maryland
After three days in the same Comfort Inn, we got up, had breakfast, packed our belongings, and checked out. We drove to Buena Vista, found the post office, and mailed 15 postcards. We then drove up to Southern Virginia College to see if we could find Camilla, which we did in the ballroom. We ate lunch with her in the cafeteria, went up to her room a final time, took pictures, and said our good-byes. A few tears were shed. And we were gone.
After stopping for gas and at the Subway for Anna and Mary to get their lunch (they did not eat with us in the cafeteria), we started our return to the Washington D.C. area. We headed north on I–81 until we turned east on U.S. 211 to Shenandoah National Park. Tuesday we had driven the bottom fourth of the park. Today we drove the top fourth. Then we continued east on I–66 to the Alexandria area.
When we got to our Comfort Inn in Ballston, the same one we stayed in our first two nights, the area was without power and we were unable to check in. As we sat waiting in the car in the parking lot, we wondered what it would take to go home a day early (Friday morning instead of Saturday morning). With Camilla safely deposited and all of us beginning to feel travel weary (there is only so much gorgeous scenery and fascinating history we can assimilate in a week), we decided anything else was anticlimactic.
We made various calls on the cell phone and were able to change our airplane tickets and make all the arrangements. The $75 per ticket change fee, totaling $375 for the five of us, was nearly canceled out by our turning the car in a day earlier, a day's less food and other expenses, and canceling our motel reservations for tonight and tomorrow night. Mary Ann Holt had arranged for a friend to give us a tour of the U.S. Capitol tomorrow, and we finally reached Mary Ann on the phone to cancel that also.
We ate dinner at the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) in Ballston, drove to Baltimore, turned in our rental car, and beginning about 10:00 spent all night waiting in the airport for our 6:30 flight to Houston. It was like having a seven- or eight-hour layover. Not a good idea.
Friday, August 25, 2000
Maryland, Texas, Utah
We thought morning would never come as we waited all night in the freezing airport. We boarded our plane at about 6:00 and flew to Houston. This time we were not as scattered throughout the plane: Claudia and I were together on one row, and Anna, Eliza, and Mary were together on another. Other than eating the little breakfast they served on the plane, I think most of us pretty much slept the whole three-hour flight.
Our layover this time in Houston was only a little over an hour, and then we flew home to Utah, arriving in the Salt Lake airport just before noon. Rebecca and Shauna came in their cars to pick us up. It had been a wonderful week, but we were glad to be home. (The flight from Houston to Salt Lake was over booked, probably because of us, and they were offering a $200 travel credit plus a flight later in the afternoon for anyone who would give up his seat. I was interested, but after waiting all night in the Baltimore airport no one else would even think of it, so we all came on home.)
In the afternoon Mom and I drove Anna back to Ephraim and saw the house at 200 South Main Street, where she is living with Bethany and Rebekah Youngs. Claudia actually stayed awake the entire return trip to keep me awake.
This morning while waiting for our flight home I wrote a letter to Camilla:
Dear Camilla,
I am writing this first letter to you while sitting in the Baltimore airport. It is about 2:00 in the morning, a time of day calculated in any time zone in the country that I should be in a bed somewhere asleep.
But I'm not. Instead, we are sitting here at gate C6 a day earlier than planned waiting for our 6:30 flight to Houston. Anna, Eliza, and Mary are sacked out on the floor. I tried that earlier but decided it was too hard for my old body. Mom is sleeping while sitting in one of these uncomfortable waiting room chairs. I tried that too, but so far that hasn't worked either. I have finished reading one of the books I got for my birthday, wrote in my trip journal, and am now writing this letter to you.
After we left you, we drove through a different part of Shenandoah National Park and then back to the Washington D.C. area. We were going to stay in the same Comfort Inn in Ballston that we stayed in our first two nights. When we got there, their power was out and we couldn't check in. So as we were sitting there waiting, we got wondering what it would take to leave a day earlier (Friday morning instead of Saturday morning).
We called Continental Airlines to see if there were seats even available on Friday. There were, but it would cost us $75 per ticket to make the change. We quickly calculated the savings from turning our rental car in a day earlier, not eating expensive Washington D.C.-area food all day Friday, and not staying in a motel either Thursday or Friday nights would all add up to the $375 it would cost us to leave a day earlier.
So we went for it, canceling motels and our tour of the Capitol building on Friday, and so on. We were all getting a little travel weary and, frankly, after leaving you, all everyone wanted to do is get home.
We drove to Baltimore, turned in the rental car, and have been here in the airport since about 10:00 Thursday night, waiting to get on our plane sometime around 6:00 Friday morning. It didn't seem worth paying for a motel for that short of a time, so here we are waiting, waiting, waiting in a cold, empty airport. I'm not sure how good of an idea that was, but here we are. It will be an additional memory I'm sure we'll never forget.
It's now 2:30, probably three hours before the airport starts coming back to life and the ticket counter reopens.
I never did get around to giving you a father's blessing. I originally meant to do it Sunday night. And then was going to on Tuesday evening. And should have Thursday afternoon when just we were there together in your room. I feel bad about that—the fact that we didn't do it.
I am confident, however, that you will have a good school year. I pray that you will, that you will take full advantage of the opportunities that come to you, that you will study hard, that you will participate fully in your ward, that you will befriend those who are lonely, that you will bless and lift those about you, that you will have joy in the journey.
Remember that there are a lot of us back home who love you, who are praying for you, who are pulling for you, who are wanting you to succeed. And there are those also on the other side of the veil who likewise—and probably even more so—love you and are interested in your happiness and success.
Read your patriarchal blessing from time to time, such as every fast Sunday, to be reminded of what the Lord has in mind for you. Study the scriptures every day. And say your prayers. Simple things, but oh so important!
I guess that’s my prayer for you. And my blessing.
Sent with all my love, Dad.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Trip to Washington
Monday, August 2, 2010
Utah and Idaho
Rebecca, Hyrum, and Mimi came and picked me up here in Bountiful about 10:30 in the morning. We were traveling in her car. I dropped her off at Costco to pick up a few items for our travels, and I filled the car there with gas. About 11:00 we actually hit the road and headed north on I-15 and then I-84 into Idaho. As we crossed the border, we honked the horn and of course sang "Here We Have Idaho" or my best rendition of it.
It was a pleasant day for traveling and, though we hit some stretches of road construction, none of them were onerous or impeded our travel much. We stopped at the first rest stop into Idaho to stretch our legs and use the bathrooms. A few hours later we exited the freeway and drove into Twin Falls to see the impressive Snake River Canyon, the Twin Falls Idaho Temple, and to eat lunch at a Wendy's. Becca and I both had salads, although I did splurge with a chocolate milkshake for dessert.
We continued on to Boise and then to Nampa, where we found Dale and LeAnn's house and where we spent the night. Dale called other family members, and eventually Lyle; Gene, Cheryl, and Ronnie; and Rex, Jackie, and Jared joined us for the evening. When Dale first called Gene, Cheryl answered the phone and said she was on her way to see him in the hospital in Boise. There had been a combine fire, and he inhaled smoke or fumes or something and had to be hauled off in an ambulance. After a few hours they determined he was going to be okay and released him. And then they came to Dale's house to visit.
We followed Dale and LeAnn around in their car as we went to visit places from my childhood, such as Nampa High School, the final home my parents lived in just off Greenhurst Road, the first home we had south of Nampa off of Missouri Avenue, and the Scism School, where I attended parts of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.
Except for Lyle, everyone else arrived after our little tour of the historic sites of Nampa. It was a late night by the time everyone arrived, visited, and finally went home, but it was good to see them all.
Tuesday, August 3
Idaho, Oregon, and Washington
We woke up (not too awfully early), ate breakfast, visited a bit more with Dale, gassed up the car at the Nampa Costco, and hit the road again sometime between 10:30 and 11:00 in the morning. We had contemplated driving out through where we used to live in eastern Oregon but decided not to due to the late hour of our starting. We thought maybe we could catch it on our return trip.
We continued west on I-84, honked as we crossed into Oregon, where I pointed out that Ontario was the town I was born in, and continued, with one rest stop, across eastern Oregon, up and over the Blue Mountains, and stopped in Pendleton for gas and lunch at a Subway. We then continued west until we intersected with I-82 and followed it across the Colombia River into Washington. We stayed on I-82 until we hit I-90 and then west from there. We stopped at another rest stop just before climbing into the Cascade Mountains. As we reached the western slope of the Cascades and into the Seattle area, we took I-405 (where we endured massive traffic backups) and I-5 north to Everett. Mimi decided she really liked all the trees in this part of Washington and thinks she would like to live here.
We went first to our motel, the Best Western Navigator Inn, and then drove back to greet Camilla and Sam in their Great Harvest bakery. Our motel is about a mile from their bakery and apartment. We arrived in Everett about 6:00 Sam time (aka Pacific Daylight Time), or 7:00 Mountain time, some eight or so hours after leaving Nampa. A long but pleasant day of driving. This was Becca's first trip to Washington since Chris and Camilla had moved here, and she thought their little bakery was absolutely darling.
After Camilla closed their store at 7:00, we walked across the parking lot to a carnival/fair at the far end of the parking lot by the grocery store to meet Chris and wandered around and got some free food (Chris had a booth there giving away free bread) and watched Hyrum and Sam play on a big inflatable slide. We then went to Chris and Camilla's apartment to visit before returning to our motel.
Wednesday, August 4
Washington
Camilla and Sam came to our motel to pick us up, and Hyrum and I went with her to the free kids movie at the theaters in Everett Mall across the street from where their bakery is located on Everett Mall Way. We saw Doogie, I think the name of it was, and then returned to the Taylors' apartment.
In the afternoon, armed with a lunch from the bakery, we all went for a picnic on a beach on the Puget Sound for a couple of hours. We drove by the Boeing plant to show Becca, Mimi, and Hyrum where they make the big airplanes. The weather was absolutely delightful for a day at the beach.
In the evening Chris and Camilla and Sam came over to visit at our motel suite, and the two four-year-olds had a great time playing in the whirlpool hot tub in the room that Becca, Mimi, and Hyrum are sleeping in. I sleep on the couch in the part of the suite that is the living room and kitchen. (We are in suite 400 on the top floor of the hotel.)
Thursday, August 5
Washington
Every morning I get up earlier than everyone else and go down to the exercise room on the main floor and walk on the treadmill for half an hour. Then I come back to the room and take Hyrum down for breakfast. He is a pretty picky eater, but I have been able to get him to eat some waffle and drink some milk, and we take some fruit (apples and oranges) and some yogurt back to the room for later snacking.
Camilla and Sam came to our motel again to pick us up, and the four of us followed in Becca's car to a park next to a little lake, where we sat on wet grass and watched a puppet musical show about pirates. We returned to the bakery for lunch. We hung out at the apartment in the afternoon until it was time to go out to a farmer's market at Lake Stephens, where Chris has a booth every Thursday evening. We wandered around the little farmer's market, ate some Mexican food for our supper, sampled bread and such, and sat on the grass by the lake and listened to the musical concert. A delightful evening.
After we returned to Everett, Camilla and Sam joined us at our motel room, and Hyrum and Sam played in the hot tub some more. They did not even need to know the place had a regular swimming pool. This was just their size anyway.
Friday, August 6
Washington
Although the weather has been lovely all week since we arrived, today was overcast and cooler and threatened rain much of the day. I tended Mimi, Hyrum, and Sam in the motel while Rebecca and Camilla went to the Seattle Washington Temple to do initiatory work. The two of them had a nice visit on the drive to and from the temple.
We decided to go down to Seattle this afternoon, so we stopped at the Everett Costco for lunch, and then all drove in one car (Becca's Mazda) to downtown to go to Pike Street Market. It was exceedingly crowded, packed with wall-to-wall people, which made it fun trying to keep track of two busy, inquisitive four-year-olds, but we enjoyed the outing. Getting to Pike Place, we drove through parts of downtown Seattle, including by the base of the famed Space Needle.
Saturday, August 7
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho
It had been a fun week, which went by all too fast. Fortunately, we did not pack it too tight with too many activities. We had nice visits with Chris, Camilla, and Sam, and it was particularly fun for the two four-year-old cousins, Hyrum and Sam, to play together. And Chris and Camilla and Sam live in a spectacularly beautiful part of the country.
We packed, checked out of the motel, and stopped by the bakery to say good-bye to Chris, Camilla, and Sam. By about 9:00 Sam time (10:00 Mountain time) we were leaving, retracing our route along I-5, I-405, I-90, I-82, and I-84 back across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to Nampa. We stopped for gas in Yakama and ate lunch at an Arctic Circle. At a town called Prosser in south central Washington, we got off I-82 and took a little detour south and then east before rejoining I-82 just before it crosses the Colombia River back into Oregon. We also stopped at a rest stop in the Blue Mountains just east of Pendleton. Somewhere in eastern Oregon, both going and coming, we passed a sign that said, "45th Parallel, Half Way Between the Equator and the North Pole."
At Ontario we stopped to get gas again and drove by the Holy Rosary Hospital, where I was born in the summer of 1949. The hospital looks a lot different and is a lot larger than it was then. We contemplated driving to Nyssa, the Owyhee Ward chapel, Adrian, and by the old homestead where I first lived on the Oregon-Idaho state line, but we had been in the car enough today, so we passed on that little side trip.
We reached Dale and LeAnn's house in Nampa about 7:00 in the evening, where we ate, visited, and played games. He was going to try to gather more of the family together again, like he did Monday evening, but none of the rest of them could make it.
Sunday, August 8
Idaho and Utah
We left Nampa this morning and spent approximately five hours driving home to Layton. Mimi and Hyrum slept much of the first half of the trip until we stopped at a rest stop near Malta. It seemed to me that both yesterday's and today's return legs of the trip went by much quicker than when we were driving on our way to Everett earlier in the week.
And now our trip was over.
Utah and Idaho
Rebecca, Hyrum, and Mimi came and picked me up here in Bountiful about 10:30 in the morning. We were traveling in her car. I dropped her off at Costco to pick up a few items for our travels, and I filled the car there with gas. About 11:00 we actually hit the road and headed north on I-15 and then I-84 into Idaho. As we crossed the border, we honked the horn and of course sang "Here We Have Idaho" or my best rendition of it.
It was a pleasant day for traveling and, though we hit some stretches of road construction, none of them were onerous or impeded our travel much. We stopped at the first rest stop into Idaho to stretch our legs and use the bathrooms. A few hours later we exited the freeway and drove into Twin Falls to see the impressive Snake River Canyon, the Twin Falls Idaho Temple, and to eat lunch at a Wendy's. Becca and I both had salads, although I did splurge with a chocolate milkshake for dessert.
We continued on to Boise and then to Nampa, where we found Dale and LeAnn's house and where we spent the night. Dale called other family members, and eventually Lyle; Gene, Cheryl, and Ronnie; and Rex, Jackie, and Jared joined us for the evening. When Dale first called Gene, Cheryl answered the phone and said she was on her way to see him in the hospital in Boise. There had been a combine fire, and he inhaled smoke or fumes or something and had to be hauled off in an ambulance. After a few hours they determined he was going to be okay and released him. And then they came to Dale's house to visit.
We followed Dale and LeAnn around in their car as we went to visit places from my childhood, such as Nampa High School, the final home my parents lived in just off Greenhurst Road, the first home we had south of Nampa off of Missouri Avenue, and the Scism School, where I attended parts of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.
Except for Lyle, everyone else arrived after our little tour of the historic sites of Nampa. It was a late night by the time everyone arrived, visited, and finally went home, but it was good to see them all.
Tuesday, August 3
Idaho, Oregon, and Washington
We woke up (not too awfully early), ate breakfast, visited a bit more with Dale, gassed up the car at the Nampa Costco, and hit the road again sometime between 10:30 and 11:00 in the morning. We had contemplated driving out through where we used to live in eastern Oregon but decided not to due to the late hour of our starting. We thought maybe we could catch it on our return trip.
We continued west on I-84, honked as we crossed into Oregon, where I pointed out that Ontario was the town I was born in, and continued, with one rest stop, across eastern Oregon, up and over the Blue Mountains, and stopped in Pendleton for gas and lunch at a Subway. We then continued west until we intersected with I-82 and followed it across the Colombia River into Washington. We stayed on I-82 until we hit I-90 and then west from there. We stopped at another rest stop just before climbing into the Cascade Mountains. As we reached the western slope of the Cascades and into the Seattle area, we took I-405 (where we endured massive traffic backups) and I-5 north to Everett. Mimi decided she really liked all the trees in this part of Washington and thinks she would like to live here.
We went first to our motel, the Best Western Navigator Inn, and then drove back to greet Camilla and Sam in their Great Harvest bakery. Our motel is about a mile from their bakery and apartment. We arrived in Everett about 6:00 Sam time (aka Pacific Daylight Time), or 7:00 Mountain time, some eight or so hours after leaving Nampa. A long but pleasant day of driving. This was Becca's first trip to Washington since Chris and Camilla had moved here, and she thought their little bakery was absolutely darling.
After Camilla closed their store at 7:00, we walked across the parking lot to a carnival/fair at the far end of the parking lot by the grocery store to meet Chris and wandered around and got some free food (Chris had a booth there giving away free bread) and watched Hyrum and Sam play on a big inflatable slide. We then went to Chris and Camilla's apartment to visit before returning to our motel.
Wednesday, August 4
Washington
Camilla and Sam came to our motel to pick us up, and Hyrum and I went with her to the free kids movie at the theaters in Everett Mall across the street from where their bakery is located on Everett Mall Way. We saw Doogie, I think the name of it was, and then returned to the Taylors' apartment.
In the afternoon, armed with a lunch from the bakery, we all went for a picnic on a beach on the Puget Sound for a couple of hours. We drove by the Boeing plant to show Becca, Mimi, and Hyrum where they make the big airplanes. The weather was absolutely delightful for a day at the beach.
In the evening Chris and Camilla and Sam came over to visit at our motel suite, and the two four-year-olds had a great time playing in the whirlpool hot tub in the room that Becca, Mimi, and Hyrum are sleeping in. I sleep on the couch in the part of the suite that is the living room and kitchen. (We are in suite 400 on the top floor of the hotel.)
Thursday, August 5
Washington
Every morning I get up earlier than everyone else and go down to the exercise room on the main floor and walk on the treadmill for half an hour. Then I come back to the room and take Hyrum down for breakfast. He is a pretty picky eater, but I have been able to get him to eat some waffle and drink some milk, and we take some fruit (apples and oranges) and some yogurt back to the room for later snacking.
Camilla and Sam came to our motel again to pick us up, and the four of us followed in Becca's car to a park next to a little lake, where we sat on wet grass and watched a puppet musical show about pirates. We returned to the bakery for lunch. We hung out at the apartment in the afternoon until it was time to go out to a farmer's market at Lake Stephens, where Chris has a booth every Thursday evening. We wandered around the little farmer's market, ate some Mexican food for our supper, sampled bread and such, and sat on the grass by the lake and listened to the musical concert. A delightful evening.
After we returned to Everett, Camilla and Sam joined us at our motel room, and Hyrum and Sam played in the hot tub some more. They did not even need to know the place had a regular swimming pool. This was just their size anyway.
Friday, August 6
Washington
Although the weather has been lovely all week since we arrived, today was overcast and cooler and threatened rain much of the day. I tended Mimi, Hyrum, and Sam in the motel while Rebecca and Camilla went to the Seattle Washington Temple to do initiatory work. The two of them had a nice visit on the drive to and from the temple.
We decided to go down to Seattle this afternoon, so we stopped at the Everett Costco for lunch, and then all drove in one car (Becca's Mazda) to downtown to go to Pike Street Market. It was exceedingly crowded, packed with wall-to-wall people, which made it fun trying to keep track of two busy, inquisitive four-year-olds, but we enjoyed the outing. Getting to Pike Place, we drove through parts of downtown Seattle, including by the base of the famed Space Needle.
Saturday, August 7
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho
It had been a fun week, which went by all too fast. Fortunately, we did not pack it too tight with too many activities. We had nice visits with Chris, Camilla, and Sam, and it was particularly fun for the two four-year-old cousins, Hyrum and Sam, to play together. And Chris and Camilla and Sam live in a spectacularly beautiful part of the country.
We packed, checked out of the motel, and stopped by the bakery to say good-bye to Chris, Camilla, and Sam. By about 9:00 Sam time (10:00 Mountain time) we were leaving, retracing our route along I-5, I-405, I-90, I-82, and I-84 back across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to Nampa. We stopped for gas in Yakama and ate lunch at an Arctic Circle. At a town called Prosser in south central Washington, we got off I-82 and took a little detour south and then east before rejoining I-82 just before it crosses the Colombia River back into Oregon. We also stopped at a rest stop in the Blue Mountains just east of Pendleton. Somewhere in eastern Oregon, both going and coming, we passed a sign that said, "45th Parallel, Half Way Between the Equator and the North Pole."
At Ontario we stopped to get gas again and drove by the Holy Rosary Hospital, where I was born in the summer of 1949. The hospital looks a lot different and is a lot larger than it was then. We contemplated driving to Nyssa, the Owyhee Ward chapel, Adrian, and by the old homestead where I first lived on the Oregon-Idaho state line, but we had been in the car enough today, so we passed on that little side trip.
We reached Dale and LeAnn's house in Nampa about 7:00 in the evening, where we ate, visited, and played games. He was going to try to gather more of the family together again, like he did Monday evening, but none of the rest of them could make it.
Sunday, August 8
Idaho and Utah
We left Nampa this morning and spent approximately five hours driving home to Layton. Mimi and Hyrum slept much of the first half of the trip until we stopped at a rest stop near Malta. It seemed to me that both yesterday's and today's return legs of the trip went by much quicker than when we were driving on our way to Everett earlier in the week.
And now our trip was over.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Trip to Houston
Prelude
Clouds moved in yesterday afternoon, and it rained some along the Wasatch Front, and humidity increased. The weatherman on TV talked about how humid it was and would continue to be during the coming days. Claudia and I had just returned from Houston, and this was not humid. Not even in the same ball park. Houston is humid.
Humidity in Salt Lake has never caused my glasses to fog up when I leave an air-conditioned building. That happened to me half a dozen times during the five days we were in Houston.
In fact, when we first mentioned to people that we were going to Houston, their incredulous response was always, “Houston in July? Why would you want to do that?” One person even told me that we should be able to find inexpensive lodging since no one goes to Houston in the summer.
We were able to find lodging in the MainStay Suites on Old Spanish Trail, near the hospital district, and not far from the Reliant Center (what used to be known as the Astrodome) that housed all six of us and fed us breakfast every morning and provided a place to exercise and park our two cars and was reasonably air-conditioned—all for $115 a day. Whether that was inexpensive I cannot say, but it seemed reasonable to me for housing six people (that works out to only $19.17 a day per person), especially when precious few places even allowed six people to stay together in the same room.
As to why we would go to Houston in July, that was easy enough. Eliza asked us to come play with her and two of our grandchildren (Peter, who will be four in October, and Aaron, who will be two in December) while Paul was off at class all day. He was here for a week doing a compounding seminar.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Utah, Colorado, Texas
About the time Michael was driving Claudia and me to the airport to catch our flight to Houston, Paul and Eliza were arriving in Houston by car from Atlanta. They had made the same trip in May and knew they had about a 13-hour drive in front of them. This time they left after Paul finished work on Monday and drove about five hours and stayed overnight in Mobile, Alabama, and then spent eight hours driving the rest of the way to Houston. Peter was disappointed that we were not already there.
Our plane was 15 minutes late leaving Salt Lake, and we were concerned that we had only 30 minutes in Denver before our next flight was scheduled to leave. Fortunately, the pilot flew fast enough to make up the 15 minutes we were late. There had been severe thunderstorms across Colorado, so everything was backed up in Denver. The plane we were concerned about getting on hadn’t even arrived at the gate yet to disgorge its passengers from wherever they were coming from. We waited and waited. Finally, the plane came, and we waited while the passengers filed off. We boarded the plane, and we waited inside the plane. The pilot announced that continuing thunderstorms prevented our being cleared to take off. We waited some more. We left Denver an hour late.
The first half of the flight from Denver to Houston was about as turbulent as any I’ve ever experienced. Claudia slept through most of it. She was bundled up in her sweater, which should have been a clue to me that she was not well. Even after arriving in Houston, she left her sweater on. That confirmed it. She later explained that whatever was ailing her had turned on all of a sudden while we were sitting in the Salt Lake airport waiting to begin our trip. Even though our plane arrived after midnight, it was still hot and muggy, and she was freezing.
We had arranged a rental car and were concerned the Alamo rental site would be closed before the shuttle got us there. It closed at 1:00 a.m., and we got there about 15 minutes before that. We picked up our car, an economy model, and also decided to pay extra to rent a GPS unit for the week. That was a good decision. It proved invaluable.
We found our hotel without much difficulty and tried to enter the room quietly so as not to wake everyone up. Eliza did greet us and asked if I wanted my birthday surprise right then. The previous day had been my 61st birthday. I said we could wait until morning when everyone else would be up, but she couldn’t wait. She then announced that she was pregnant. She and Paul are expecting their third child on January 7. That was a wonderful birthday surprise.
Wednesday, July 21
Texas
While the boys were still sleeping, Eliza drove Paul his class. Aaron, who by now was in the middle of the queen bed Paul and Eliza had slept in, woke up first and appeared completely bewildered. Here he was in a strange place with strange people in the bed next to him and no parents anywhere in site. He could see Peter sleeping over on the couch across the room. He kept stealing glances my way. He never did fuss or panic but looked, well, bewildered. Peter, on the other hand, was ecstatic when he woke up. He was so happy to have Grandma and Grandpa here finally.
Our room was on the fourth floor of the building and had a little balcony that looked out toward downtown. Planes approaching Hobby airport were easy to watch from the balcony. They had been watching the planes the night before, and Peter kept asking whenever there was a Southwest plane if Grandma and Grandpa were on it.
After Eliza returned from taking Paul, we all went down to breakfast. They offered a nice spread with lots of choices. We learned that Peter has become a picky eater, but Aaron will pretty much devour anything he can fit into his mouth. We were amused that the waffle maker produced waffles in the shape of Texas.
With Claudia not feeling well, we had a low-key day. She rested much of the day. Eliza and I took the boys and went shopping first at Sam's Club and then at Kroger for food for the week. Our room had a stove top (but no oven), microwave, refrigerator, small sink, and very limited counter space, so we could deal with simple meals. Both the Sam's Club and Kroger were conveniently nearby.
In the late afternoon Eliza, Peter, Aaron, and I went to pick Paul up from his class. We then went to Chuck-E-Cheese to eat and play. We were there several hours. As we walked out to the parking lot, I had the first of several instances of my glasses fogging up. (Actually the second; the first occurred when we stepped out of the airport when we first arrived in Houston at something after midnight.)
We drove back to the Alamo car rental place near the Hobby airport to sign Paul up as an additional driver on the rental car so he could take the smaller car to his class each day and leave us with their larger vehicle (which holds five of the six of us here).
Wednesday evening I finally made phone contact with Rich and Amy Hogan. We are planning to attend church with them on Sunday, and Amy invited us to Sunday dinner afterward. While talking with Amy, she told us about the outdoor theater at a place called Miller Outdoor Theater, which I then looked up online.
A word about being online. Just before we all arrived, severe electrical storms had knocked out the hotel's telephone system, fried some of the DVD players, and completely interrupted wireless Internet service. People came into our unit at least twice checking on our phones (as if we would ever use them, since we all have cell phones). Our DVD player happened to work but only in black-and-white. No color. Our Internet service was spotty and easily interrupted.
Thursday, July 22
Texas
Claudia continues to feel sick. In the afternoon I took her to an emergency room at the Woman's Hospital of Texas to make sure she did not have a strep infection, such as was running through Michael and Shauna's family the previous week. She had a headache, sore throat, sore ears, and such. The doctor determined there was no strep but did prescribe an antibiotic just to be sure. Eliza and I went and filled the prescription at the Kroger's pharmacy.
Friday, July 23
Texas
Based on Amy Hogan's tip, this morning Eliza and I took Peter and Aaron to the Miller Outdoor Theater in Hermann Park to see a stage performance of "Jack and the Beanstalk." It was a bit of a musical, and the characters engaged the audience at various points. The theater was near the entrance to the Houston Zoo. After the little play I paid for the $3-per-person tickets for us to take a train ride around the park. We judged it was about four or five times longer than the little train ride around Salt Lake's Hogle Zoo.
Claudia had stayed in the hotel to rest. It occurred to me that she is actually getting far better, more extensive rest here than she would have back at home. Plus, there was the added benefit for her of not experiencing the oppressive humidity and heat outside.
Paul, Eliza, Peter, Aaron, and I enjoyed an evening at the ballpark watching the Cincinnati Reds beat the Houston Astros. There were fireworks after, so it was kind of like being in Utah to celebrate Pioneer Day. They were more impressive than what we would have seen this evening at Mueller Park Junior High had we been in Bountiful for Handcart Days.
Peter and Aaron are veteran game attenders, having attended several home games of the Atlanta Braves. Now they've been to one in Houston. And they did great. It's darling hearing them sing "Take me out to the ballgame . . ."
In Texas, after singing "Take me out to the ballgame" at the seventh-inning stretch, they also sing "Deep in the heart of Texas," the one that goes:
The stars at night are big and bright
Deep in the heart of Texas.
The prairie sky is wide and high
Deep in the heart of Texas.
And they sing all the verses. You have to love it.
The waffle maker in the hotel's breakfast room also makes Texas-shaped waffles, just as Eliza reported after their visit to Houston in May.
That reminds me of what a wife of a new mission president told me last month at the mission presidents' seminar. They were from Texas. She said something to the effect, "You don't really need to ask people where they are from. If they're from Texas, they'll tell you soon enough. And if they're not, you don't want to embarrass them."
Saturday, July 24
Texas
Paul and Eliza went to the temple this morning while we watched Peter and Aaron. Claudia and I get to the temple several times a month in Bountiful. The Atlanta Georgia Temple closed for major renovation shortly after Paul and Eliza moved there, so they get to a temple rarely.
Late in the afternoon we drove to the Downtown Aquarium and spent the evening seeing the fish and sharks and white Bengal tigers and such stuff. We rode the merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, and little train that went around the property. A nice evening. Claudia was feeling better and went with us. It was her first outing here, except for the trip to the hospital the other afternoon.
We watched a DVD movie back in our room after the boys went to sleep. Invictus was the story of Nelson Mandella's election as president of South Africa and his support of the nation's rugby team as it helped draw the country together by winning the 1995 rugby world cup.
Sunday, July 25
Texas
This morning we drove north to Spring, which is where the Houston Texas Temple is located, to attend church with our dear friends, Rich and Amy Hogan. Five of their six children are now married, and they have three grandchildren. Seventeen-year-old Cami still lives at home. We calculated we last visited in their home 15 years ago, in the spring of 1995, when we were driving across the southern tier of states on our way to see Rachael graduate from Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Eliza was 12 years old at the time.
Church meetings were good. Laurie Harper Cole, the married daughter of Bruce and Jean Harper, also lives in the same ward. She and her family came in just as the meeting was starting and sat in the row just in front of us. Laurie really did a double take when she glanced back and saw us sitting there. We had a chance to visit briefly after sacrament meeting.
After church we drove by the temple and then to the Hogans' home for a delicious Sunday dinner that Amy prepared. We then visited for several hours and left around 8:00 p.m. to drive back to our hotel. It was a wonderful sabbath day. And Claudia was feeling much better today.
A dramatic thunderstorm moved through the area after we were back in our room.
Monday, July 26
Texas, New Mexico, Utah
We awoke early, after a fitful night wondering if we would hear the alarm and get up soon enough to get back to the airport. We got up about 6:30 (5:30 by the time we are used to), packed, said good-bye to Paul, and went downstairs to eat a final breakfast with Eliza, Peter, and Aaron. Peter particularly was sad that we had to be leaving. By now it was nearly 8:00, so we said our last good-byes, stopped to fill our rental car with gas, and then turned it in. A shuttle took us over to the airport. We stood in a long line to get through the security checkpoint, and then waited at our gate, where we boarded our plane.
I talked on the phone with Eliza, and she said she had asked the boys what was their favorite part of the whole week in Houston. They answered, "Grandma and Grandpa."
The flight left on time at 9:35 a.m. We flew to Albuquerque but stayed on the same plane while some passengers got off and new ones came on before we headed on home to Salt Lake City. We touched down in Salt Lake about 15 minutes early. Shauna, Andrew, Ethan, Marta, and Hyrum came to pick us up and drove us home to Bountiful.
It had been a good week. I talked on the phone with Eliza again to let her know we had made it safely home. She said they boys had been playing on the bed where we had slept, and Peter sweetly said, "It smells like Grandpa."
Paul's final day of his compounding class was Tuesday, after which they were hitting the road and heading on home to Atlanta.
Clouds moved in yesterday afternoon, and it rained some along the Wasatch Front, and humidity increased. The weatherman on TV talked about how humid it was and would continue to be during the coming days. Claudia and I had just returned from Houston, and this was not humid. Not even in the same ball park. Houston is humid.
Humidity in Salt Lake has never caused my glasses to fog up when I leave an air-conditioned building. That happened to me half a dozen times during the five days we were in Houston.
In fact, when we first mentioned to people that we were going to Houston, their incredulous response was always, “Houston in July? Why would you want to do that?” One person even told me that we should be able to find inexpensive lodging since no one goes to Houston in the summer.
We were able to find lodging in the MainStay Suites on Old Spanish Trail, near the hospital district, and not far from the Reliant Center (what used to be known as the Astrodome) that housed all six of us and fed us breakfast every morning and provided a place to exercise and park our two cars and was reasonably air-conditioned—all for $115 a day. Whether that was inexpensive I cannot say, but it seemed reasonable to me for housing six people (that works out to only $19.17 a day per person), especially when precious few places even allowed six people to stay together in the same room.
As to why we would go to Houston in July, that was easy enough. Eliza asked us to come play with her and two of our grandchildren (Peter, who will be four in October, and Aaron, who will be two in December) while Paul was off at class all day. He was here for a week doing a compounding seminar.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Utah, Colorado, Texas
About the time Michael was driving Claudia and me to the airport to catch our flight to Houston, Paul and Eliza were arriving in Houston by car from Atlanta. They had made the same trip in May and knew they had about a 13-hour drive in front of them. This time they left after Paul finished work on Monday and drove about five hours and stayed overnight in Mobile, Alabama, and then spent eight hours driving the rest of the way to Houston. Peter was disappointed that we were not already there.
Our plane was 15 minutes late leaving Salt Lake, and we were concerned that we had only 30 minutes in Denver before our next flight was scheduled to leave. Fortunately, the pilot flew fast enough to make up the 15 minutes we were late. There had been severe thunderstorms across Colorado, so everything was backed up in Denver. The plane we were concerned about getting on hadn’t even arrived at the gate yet to disgorge its passengers from wherever they were coming from. We waited and waited. Finally, the plane came, and we waited while the passengers filed off. We boarded the plane, and we waited inside the plane. The pilot announced that continuing thunderstorms prevented our being cleared to take off. We waited some more. We left Denver an hour late.
The first half of the flight from Denver to Houston was about as turbulent as any I’ve ever experienced. Claudia slept through most of it. She was bundled up in her sweater, which should have been a clue to me that she was not well. Even after arriving in Houston, she left her sweater on. That confirmed it. She later explained that whatever was ailing her had turned on all of a sudden while we were sitting in the Salt Lake airport waiting to begin our trip. Even though our plane arrived after midnight, it was still hot and muggy, and she was freezing.
We had arranged a rental car and were concerned the Alamo rental site would be closed before the shuttle got us there. It closed at 1:00 a.m., and we got there about 15 minutes before that. We picked up our car, an economy model, and also decided to pay extra to rent a GPS unit for the week. That was a good decision. It proved invaluable.
We found our hotel without much difficulty and tried to enter the room quietly so as not to wake everyone up. Eliza did greet us and asked if I wanted my birthday surprise right then. The previous day had been my 61st birthday. I said we could wait until morning when everyone else would be up, but she couldn’t wait. She then announced that she was pregnant. She and Paul are expecting their third child on January 7. That was a wonderful birthday surprise.
Wednesday, July 21
Texas
While the boys were still sleeping, Eliza drove Paul his class. Aaron, who by now was in the middle of the queen bed Paul and Eliza had slept in, woke up first and appeared completely bewildered. Here he was in a strange place with strange people in the bed next to him and no parents anywhere in site. He could see Peter sleeping over on the couch across the room. He kept stealing glances my way. He never did fuss or panic but looked, well, bewildered. Peter, on the other hand, was ecstatic when he woke up. He was so happy to have Grandma and Grandpa here finally.
Our room was on the fourth floor of the building and had a little balcony that looked out toward downtown. Planes approaching Hobby airport were easy to watch from the balcony. They had been watching the planes the night before, and Peter kept asking whenever there was a Southwest plane if Grandma and Grandpa were on it.
After Eliza returned from taking Paul, we all went down to breakfast. They offered a nice spread with lots of choices. We learned that Peter has become a picky eater, but Aaron will pretty much devour anything he can fit into his mouth. We were amused that the waffle maker produced waffles in the shape of Texas.
With Claudia not feeling well, we had a low-key day. She rested much of the day. Eliza and I took the boys and went shopping first at Sam's Club and then at Kroger for food for the week. Our room had a stove top (but no oven), microwave, refrigerator, small sink, and very limited counter space, so we could deal with simple meals. Both the Sam's Club and Kroger were conveniently nearby.
In the late afternoon Eliza, Peter, Aaron, and I went to pick Paul up from his class. We then went to Chuck-E-Cheese to eat and play. We were there several hours. As we walked out to the parking lot, I had the first of several instances of my glasses fogging up. (Actually the second; the first occurred when we stepped out of the airport when we first arrived in Houston at something after midnight.)
We drove back to the Alamo car rental place near the Hobby airport to sign Paul up as an additional driver on the rental car so he could take the smaller car to his class each day and leave us with their larger vehicle (which holds five of the six of us here).
Wednesday evening I finally made phone contact with Rich and Amy Hogan. We are planning to attend church with them on Sunday, and Amy invited us to Sunday dinner afterward. While talking with Amy, she told us about the outdoor theater at a place called Miller Outdoor Theater, which I then looked up online.
A word about being online. Just before we all arrived, severe electrical storms had knocked out the hotel's telephone system, fried some of the DVD players, and completely interrupted wireless Internet service. People came into our unit at least twice checking on our phones (as if we would ever use them, since we all have cell phones). Our DVD player happened to work but only in black-and-white. No color. Our Internet service was spotty and easily interrupted.
Thursday, July 22
Texas
Claudia continues to feel sick. In the afternoon I took her to an emergency room at the Woman's Hospital of Texas to make sure she did not have a strep infection, such as was running through Michael and Shauna's family the previous week. She had a headache, sore throat, sore ears, and such. The doctor determined there was no strep but did prescribe an antibiotic just to be sure. Eliza and I went and filled the prescription at the Kroger's pharmacy.
Friday, July 23
Texas
Based on Amy Hogan's tip, this morning Eliza and I took Peter and Aaron to the Miller Outdoor Theater in Hermann Park to see a stage performance of "Jack and the Beanstalk." It was a bit of a musical, and the characters engaged the audience at various points. The theater was near the entrance to the Houston Zoo. After the little play I paid for the $3-per-person tickets for us to take a train ride around the park. We judged it was about four or five times longer than the little train ride around Salt Lake's Hogle Zoo.
Claudia had stayed in the hotel to rest. It occurred to me that she is actually getting far better, more extensive rest here than she would have back at home. Plus, there was the added benefit for her of not experiencing the oppressive humidity and heat outside.
Paul, Eliza, Peter, Aaron, and I enjoyed an evening at the ballpark watching the Cincinnati Reds beat the Houston Astros. There were fireworks after, so it was kind of like being in Utah to celebrate Pioneer Day. They were more impressive than what we would have seen this evening at Mueller Park Junior High had we been in Bountiful for Handcart Days.
Peter and Aaron are veteran game attenders, having attended several home games of the Atlanta Braves. Now they've been to one in Houston. And they did great. It's darling hearing them sing "Take me out to the ballgame . . ."
In Texas, after singing "Take me out to the ballgame" at the seventh-inning stretch, they also sing "Deep in the heart of Texas," the one that goes:
The stars at night are big and bright
Deep in the heart of Texas.
The prairie sky is wide and high
Deep in the heart of Texas.
And they sing all the verses. You have to love it.
The waffle maker in the hotel's breakfast room also makes Texas-shaped waffles, just as Eliza reported after their visit to Houston in May.
That reminds me of what a wife of a new mission president told me last month at the mission presidents' seminar. They were from Texas. She said something to the effect, "You don't really need to ask people where they are from. If they're from Texas, they'll tell you soon enough. And if they're not, you don't want to embarrass them."
Saturday, July 24
Texas
Paul and Eliza went to the temple this morning while we watched Peter and Aaron. Claudia and I get to the temple several times a month in Bountiful. The Atlanta Georgia Temple closed for major renovation shortly after Paul and Eliza moved there, so they get to a temple rarely.
Late in the afternoon we drove to the Downtown Aquarium and spent the evening seeing the fish and sharks and white Bengal tigers and such stuff. We rode the merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, and little train that went around the property. A nice evening. Claudia was feeling better and went with us. It was her first outing here, except for the trip to the hospital the other afternoon.
We watched a DVD movie back in our room after the boys went to sleep. Invictus was the story of Nelson Mandella's election as president of South Africa and his support of the nation's rugby team as it helped draw the country together by winning the 1995 rugby world cup.
Sunday, July 25
Texas
This morning we drove north to Spring, which is where the Houston Texas Temple is located, to attend church with our dear friends, Rich and Amy Hogan. Five of their six children are now married, and they have three grandchildren. Seventeen-year-old Cami still lives at home. We calculated we last visited in their home 15 years ago, in the spring of 1995, when we were driving across the southern tier of states on our way to see Rachael graduate from Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Eliza was 12 years old at the time.
Church meetings were good. Laurie Harper Cole, the married daughter of Bruce and Jean Harper, also lives in the same ward. She and her family came in just as the meeting was starting and sat in the row just in front of us. Laurie really did a double take when she glanced back and saw us sitting there. We had a chance to visit briefly after sacrament meeting.
After church we drove by the temple and then to the Hogans' home for a delicious Sunday dinner that Amy prepared. We then visited for several hours and left around 8:00 p.m. to drive back to our hotel. It was a wonderful sabbath day. And Claudia was feeling much better today.
A dramatic thunderstorm moved through the area after we were back in our room.
Monday, July 26
Texas, New Mexico, Utah
We awoke early, after a fitful night wondering if we would hear the alarm and get up soon enough to get back to the airport. We got up about 6:30 (5:30 by the time we are used to), packed, said good-bye to Paul, and went downstairs to eat a final breakfast with Eliza, Peter, and Aaron. Peter particularly was sad that we had to be leaving. By now it was nearly 8:00, so we said our last good-byes, stopped to fill our rental car with gas, and then turned it in. A shuttle took us over to the airport. We stood in a long line to get through the security checkpoint, and then waited at our gate, where we boarded our plane.
I talked on the phone with Eliza, and she said she had asked the boys what was their favorite part of the whole week in Houston. They answered, "Grandma and Grandpa."
The flight left on time at 9:35 a.m. We flew to Albuquerque but stayed on the same plane while some passengers got off and new ones came on before we headed on home to Salt Lake City. We touched down in Salt Lake about 15 minutes early. Shauna, Andrew, Ethan, Marta, and Hyrum came to pick us up and drove us home to Bountiful.
It had been a good week. I talked on the phone with Eliza again to let her know we had made it safely home. She said they boys had been playing on the bed where we had slept, and Peter sweetly said, "It smells like Grandpa."
Paul's final day of his compounding class was Tuesday, after which they were hitting the road and heading on home to Atlanta.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Along the back roads of America
Journal excerpts from ten years ago recounting a 2,869-mile trip through six states, starting with a couple days at our condo in Lava Hot Springs and helping Rachael move to Kansas City to live with her friend Kathryn Kieffer
Friday, July 21, 2000
Utah, Idaho
Our adventure began about 5:00 this afternoon—just two hours after our original target—as our three cars pulled onto northbound I–15 at Layton: Rachael and Camilla in Rachael's blue Geo Prism, Eliza and I in our green Saturn, and Michael, Meghan, and Caleb in their tan Honda Accord. Traffic thinned out somewhere north of Ogden, probably near Willard Bay, which is about where the battery failed on one of our new walkie-talkies (we hadn't been sure it was fully charged), which we were using between our car and Rachael's.
After we crossed into Idaho and Eliza had to endure my awful rendition of "Here We Have Idaho," we called Mom on the cell phone to report we were in a new state. She and Mary were staying home in Bountiful because of Mary's dizzy spells. Shauna and Jacob were in Layton. Cade, Rebecca, and Mimi starting today were spending a week at a condo near Eden. Talmage and Carisa were at Lake Powell. And Anna is in Ephraim working at Snow College for the summer.
By 7:00 we reached Lava Hot Springs, a little resort town ten or eleven miles east of I–15 on US 30. With two or three exceptions, we have come here every July since 1980 to stay in our condo at Hot Springs Village. This year we are only staying a couple days.
About 7:20 all of us but Rachael went swimming in the big pool. It was not crowded, and Meghan and Caleb especially enjoyed going down the slide, mostly on Eliza's lap, occasionally on Camilla's, never by themselves. Meanwhile, Rachael had gone to Shawn's Market to buy food for supper and had macaroni and cheese, rolls, and a berry drink ready for us when we returned from swimming.
Michael and I, still in our wet swimsuits, went quickly to the store to get hotdogs and sherbet to add to Rachael's supper and also fixings for breakfast.
I slept alone in the big bed on the east end of our unit. Michael, Meghan, and Caleb, who started out in the bunk beds, ended up sleeping on the floor at the foot of my bed. Rachael and Camilla each slept on one of the hide-a-beds in the west end. Eliza slept on the bottom bunk.
Saturday, July 22, 2000
Idaho
This morning Eliza and I took Meghan and Caleb for a walk along the Portneuf River that runs through town and back along Lava's Main Street. By the end we were carrying them on our shoulders.
Knowing there was a Pioneer Day parade sometime this weekend, we tried to find out when. A kid in one of the shops on Main Street thought it was today at 4:00, 5:00, or 6:00. The lady in the grocery store thought it was tomorrow at 5:00. And Gerri in the condo office thought it was either at 10:00 this morning or 6:00 this evening, having been told those alternative times, she said, by someone who was actually going to be in the parade. It turned out to be at 6:00 this evening.
Back at the condo, after our walk, Eliza and I fixed waffles, scrambled eggs, and orange juice for breakfast. Camilla cleaned up afterward.We had a pretty lazy day, which is what Lava for us is all about. We spent time reading, playing pool and other games at the club house, playing on the swings and other outdoor toys with Meghan and Caleb, watching TV, and such. Caleb likes the trains that rumble by several times a day, just like his daddy did 20 years ago.
This afternoon we went to the ice cream parlor on Main Street, Smitty's Sweet Shop. Caleb, who had the smallest cone possible, was a dripping mess by the time he had eaten all he wanted of his. Sitting in the air-conditioned shop, eating our ice cream, was a welcome break from the oppressive heat outside. It was a hot one (97 degrees we heard on the news tonight, 103 degrees down in Salt Lake, where poor Mom was tending house with a broken air conditioner that won't get fixed until next Wednesday at soonest).
Michael, Meghan, and Caleb left for home at 3:15, as soon as we had finished at the ice cream store. Shauna had called earlier to see how everyone was doing and to mention her dad had driven up this morning in a minivan and took away their old red car. Wow!
The four of us remaining—Rachael, Camilla, Eliza, and I—played pool, fixed shredded potatoes and hot dogs for supper, went to the little parade (actually just Eliza and I went to the 10-minute parade), and drove out to historic Chesterfield, now a ghost town with some of its buildings well preserved. It was founded in 1880 by settlers from Davis County who were finding Utah getting too crowded. We walked through the cemetery, which is well kept, and looked at headstones. Many of the same surnames seen in the Bountiful cemetery were here: Call, Hatch, Holbrook, Sessions, Muir. The earliest birth date we could find was 1822. The earliest death date 1888. The most recent burial 1998.
Back in Lava, we stopped at Shawn's Market to buy ice and provisions for our travels tomorrow.
Several times during the day we talked with Mom on our cell phone. This way she gets to share in the journey without having to ride in the car or endure the summer heat (except she is doing that at home anyway with a broken air conditioner). She doesn't do heat well.
Sunday, July 23, 2000
Idaho, Wyoming
We awoke, ate breakfast, got ready for church, and at 10:00 attended sacrament meeting in the Lava Hot Springs Ward. We returned to our condo, packed and cleaned up, ate lunch, and at 1:15 headed east on US 30 toward Soda Springs.
We decided we wanted to see Star Valley, which we'd never been to before, so we headed north out of Soda Springs on state highway 34, a scenic drive that took us north and east into Wyoming near Freedom. We headed south on US 89 through Thayne, Grover, Afton, and Smoot. We reached an elevation of 7,630 feet crossing the Salt River Pass before slipping back into Idaho briefly and then back into Wyoming for the rest of the day.
At Border, Wyoming, we rejoined US 30 and followed it south to Cokeville, east to Kemmerer (the home of J.C. Penney), and southeast to I–80, which we then traveled along past Little America, Green River, and Rock Springs to Rawlins, where we spent the might at the Sleep Inn. The air conditioning had been knocked out by a lightening storm a couple days earlier, so we were given an additional discount off our room. We ate sandwiches, Jell-o, pop, and cookies in our room. Eliza and I went for a walk at sunset.
We arrived in Rawlins about 7:30, a little over six hours after leaving Lava. Camilla and Rachael drove in one car, Eliza and I in the other. We used our walkie-talkies to communicate with each other. Eliza read me chapters from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as we traveled. Anna called us from Michael and Shauna's house just as we were approaching the tunnel by Green River. We talked to Mom a couple of times. She informed us that Uncle Irv, my dad's twin brother, had died Friday. He was 85.
Monday, July 24, 2000
Wyoming, Nebraska
Pioneer Day, which we spent at Martin's Cove, Devils Gate, Independence Rock, and Scotts Bluff—all important landmarks along the Oregon, California, and Mormon pioneer trails.
We ate breakfast at the Sleep Inn, filled the cars with expensive gas ($1.65 a gallon), and headed north out of Rawlins on US 287. Not far out of town we waited for about 20 minutes because of road construction. At Lamont we stopped to take pictures of the sign saying "Lamont, Population 3."
Camilla, Eliza, and I had been to Martin's Cove with Mom and Mary three years ago, during the pioneer sesquicentennial. This was Rachael’s first visit. We went through the visitor center, watched a brief film about the experiences of a boy in the Martin Handcart Company of 1856, pulled a handcart out to the Veil Crossing, walked over to Devils Gate, and returned the handcart (with my riding while the three girls pulled me) back to the parking lot.
Next we drove 10 miles or so further east to Independence Rock. Rachael and Camilla waited at the rest stop at the bottom while Eliza and I climbed to the top. (Eliza had been on top of Ensign Peak on Independence Day and now Independence Rock on Pioneer Day.) From the top we called Mom at home and used our walkie-talkies to communicate with Rachael and Camilla at the bottom.
We then continued on to Casper, the second largest city in Wyoming, where we stopped to eat at a Pizza Hut and where Rachael made comments in front of our waitress about how ugly Wyoming was. We then headed south on I–25 until US 26 took off east toward Nebraska. We arrived in Scottsbluff a little before 6:00 and checked into our room at the Comfort Inn.
This evening we drove out to Scotts Bluff National Monument, where Donna Davey, one of the park rangers, was very kind in helping us. She let us drive the mile and a half to the top, although it was nearly time to close the road for the evening, and was most helpful when we returned back to the visitor center. She even gave us helpful hints on where to eat and how best to drive back to our motel.
On the way back, as we were driving through Gering, we stopped to eat at a Runza restaurant, famous throughout Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Colorado for its Runza sandwich, which has German–Russian roots stretching back to the 18th century. The unique blend of fresh ground beef, cabbage, onions, and special spices baked inside home-made bread has been passed down for generations and debuted commercially in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1949, the year I was born. Rachael had a Swiss and mushroom Runza sandwich, I had a tossed salad, and Camilla and Eliza had cheese and broccoli soup and milkshakes.
Hyde Frederickson called tonight to report that Jack White in our ward died this evening. He had lain down for a nap and was gone by two hours later when Helen went in to wake him up for dinner. [I was serving as bishop at the time and felt bad I was not there to assist Helen and her family and even contemplated ways I could abort the trip and get back to Utah. I also wanted to be home for my Uncle Irv's funeral, but in the end I missed both funerals.]
Tuesday, July 25, 2000
Nebraska
This morning, after getting ready for the day and eating our standard continental breakfast, we were on our way again. Just east of Scottsbluff we stopped alongside the Burlington Northern tracks to see the grave site of Rebecca Winters, a pioneer woman who died at age 50 from cholera as she was traveling with her family along the Mormon Pioneer Trail. I believe she is an ancestor of my uncle, Dean Winters.
We continued a few miles more until reaching Chimney Rock, probably the most famous landmark along the pioneer trails. We had our National Park passport, which we had purchased the night before, stamped and saw a film in the visitor center and bought postcards.
We then turned north on US 385 toward Alliance, where we went to Carhenge a few miles north of town. Thirteen years ago the people who owned the farm decided at a family reunion to build an exact replica (as to size, dimensions, and orientation) of England's famous Stonehenge but out of cars instead of stones. Interesting.
We took pictures, returned to Alliance, ate lunch at McDonald's, and headed east along Nebraska highway 2 through the beautiful and isolated Sand Hills country. We passed successively through or by little towns represented by dots on the map: Antioch, Lakeside, Ellsworth, Bingham, Ashby, Hyannis, Whitman, Mullen, Seneca, Thedford, Halsey, Dunning, Anselmo, Merna—many of them so small they didn't even have the water towers or grain elevators common to Midwestern towns.
Mullen, one of the larger towns with 500-some people, located near the Middle Loup River at the intersection of highways 2 and 97, is the only town in all of Hooker County. Another 200 people live scattered on farms throughout the rest of the county. Just east of Mullen, at the county line, we crossed from the mountain into the central time zone.
At Broken Bow we stopped for gas and a snack. Less than 20 miles further, at Ansley, we turned off highway 2 onto 92, with a clear shot east (through half a dozen more counties) to Omaha. This portion of the trip was through lovely rolling farm country rather than the rolling grasslands of the Sand Hills region. Loup City, Ashton, Farewell, St. Paul, Osceola, Shelby, Rising City, Wahoo were the towns we passed. A gorgeous sunset was at our backs at Wahoo.
It was dark by the time we reached our Comfort Inn in Omaha. We had spent the entire day traveling the back roads of Nebraska, not once coming anywhere near an Interstate, and it had been a wonderful day. We ate a late supper in our motel room with take-out from an Arby's restaurant.
Wednesday, July 26, 2000
Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri
Every other day the girls switch cars: Eliza rode with me on Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday; Camilla rode with me on Monday and again today.
This morning we visited the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters, a lovely new visitor center built since our last visit here seven years ago when we were taking Rachael to Peace College in North Carolina. In the center we met a Sister Wakefield, a niece of Garth Wakefield, who works with me in the Missionary Department. We also met an Elder and Sister Ross Williams, whom we knew in Rose Park 24 years ago. After taking the tour of the center and watching a film about the Saints' stay at Winter Quarters in 1846–47, we walked through the peaceful pioneer cemetery and saw the new temple under construction next to the cemetery. It is supposed to be completed by the end of the year.
Back on I–680, we drove across the Mormon Memorial Bridge into Iowa, joined I–29 and headed south into Council Bluffs, where we found the reconstructed Kanesville Tabernacle, where Brigham Young was first sustained as the second President of the Church, with Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards as his counselors in the First Presidency, at a special conference on December 27, 1847. Elder Williams, whom we had seen over in Winter Quarters, was our tour guide. He let Camilla and me play an old organ—over a hundred years old, he said—in the tabernacle.
We ate lunch at a Blimpie restaurant up the street, got gas, found I–80, and headed back across the Missouri River into Nebraska. Back in Omaha, we headed south on US 75 down the eastern edge of Nebraska rather than driving on I–29 down the western edge of Iowa. The Missouri River forms the boundary between the two states.
South of Nebraska City, we turned off US 75 onto state highways 128, then 67, to find the little town of Talmage, population 246, and took pictures. (There is also a Talmage in Kansas that has only 126 people living in it.)
We returned to US 75 and at Auburn turned east on US 136, crossed the river into Missouri, and headed south another 100 miles or so on I–29 to Kansas City. From our visit here last summer, we were able to drive straight to the Kieffers' house at NW Adrian Terrace, which is just off I–29 at exit 5. Mom and Dad Kieffer are in Utah this week, Kenny had left for work at 3:30, and Kathryn was supposed to have been home from work by 5:00. It was about 6:45 when we arrived, and Rachael went through the garage, which was not locked, and peeked her head in the door into the house, which was not locked, calling for Kathryn, who was not home, and set off the burglar alarm, which was not turned off.
So we waited outside. Half an hour later two policemen showed up in a squad car to see if everything was OK. We explained the situation and apparently looked honest, and they were nice about it, but had we been actual burglars we could have hauled away a lot of the house before they arrived. We waited some more. A friend of Kathryn's came by and knew how to turn the alarm off, so we were able to wait inside the house. She said Kathryn had gone shopping with a friend. We waited some more. Still no Kathryn, so finally we wrote her a note with our cell number on it, and we went to eat dinner at an Applebee's. Kathryn was home when we got back, and we sat up visiting until midnight.
Severe thunderstorms moved across the Kansas City metro area and put on quite a spectacular light show, reminiscent of our visit here last year when lightening knocked down their neighbor's tree. (This afternoon, when we were still in southeastern Nebraska, we had heard on the radio tornado watches for southeastern Nebraska and southwestern Iowa, although the weather looked fine to us at the time.)
Uncle Irv's funeral was held today in Woods Cross.
Thursday, July 27, 2000
Missouri
Tonight, sitting in the Kieffers' living room in Kansas City, I finished reading one of my birthday books, Larry McMurtry's Roads: Driving America's Great Highways. I share McMurtry's passions for books and the road (he lists a third: women) and have enjoyed both during this week's foray into middle America. Not only did I read Roads, but Eliza has been reading aloud from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as we made our way across the back roads of Wyoming and Nebraska.
In his final chapter, McMurtry writes, "Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women, which was that there are just too many nice ones. . . .
"As it is with women, so it is with roads. There are too many nice ones. I could go on for a long time, driving America's roads. I could see the sandhills of Nebraska, follow the old Oregon Trail along the North Platte, see the Tetons, dodge moose in Maine, slip down to Salt Lake City and remind myself what an inspired city planner Brigham Young had been.
"But I can't drive all the roads. On even the narrowest highways that I've driven on these trips, and in even the smallest towns, there are signs pointing down even narrower highways to even smaller towns, many of which I will never see."
Something like that thought occurred to me yesterday afternoon as we were pushing south along US 75 in eastern Nebraska. Our fourth child and second son is named Talmage. We knew from our road atlas that a little town named Talmage, population 246, was in these parts.
As we were looking for Talmage, we overshot our intended turn off by a few miles, so turned instead onto a little paved road that after a half mile turned into "a rock road," so called by the friendly farmer from Talmage who stopped to see if we needed help as we sat at roadside studying the atlas. He wondered who we were visiting in Talmage and, after explaining our purpose in visiting there, explained that we could indeed arrive there along the rock road (what I would call a dirt or gravel road) that his tractor was planning to follow but suggested we go back and take the regular road instead. "Maybe I'll see you there," was his parting comment. He seemed so helpful, I was almost surprised we weren't invited for supper.
We backtracked to state highway 128, one of those narrower roads that lead to even smaller towns that McMurtry referred to, and I thought of all the myriads of little roads like this that crisscross the places people call home. After a few miles heading west, we turned south on state highway 67 and after another couple miles had to take an even narrower road, a half-mile spur that led to the little town. Talmage. Like so many other towns we've seen here in the Midwest, the name was proudly emblazoned on the town's water tower, as if water towers wandered off or were misplaced and had to be returned from time to time to their rightful owners.
Today was a rest day. It was afternoon by the time we were ready to go find the Liberty Jail visitor center and deliver a package of pamphlets from Winter Quarters. We took the tour at Liberty Jail, where Joseph Smith and his companions were in prison during the cold winter of 1838–39 and where some of the most sublime revelations were given to the Prophet.
We then drove back to Independence in Jackson County and visited the home of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States. He was the president when I was born in 1949 and Claudia in 1951. The guided tours through the home are limited to only eight people at a time. We were the last tour of the day.
Afterward we drove by the Truman Library eight blocks away, the temple and other world headquarters sites of the RLDS Church, the LDS visitor center, and the National Historic Trails site (which had just closed for the day).
We drove back to the Kieffers' house in Platte County, and Kathryn had dinner ready for us. Rachael and Kathryn went off to an Institute class this evening. Camilla, Eliza, and I caught up on journals, read, and such. I finished reading Roads: Driving America's Great Highways.
Friday, July 28, 2000
Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming
Today we headed home. We told Rachael good-bye and took off. She was standing in the Kieffers' driveway as we left, looking pretty sad, reminding us of an August afternoon seven years ago when we left her bawling in a parking lot at Peace College.
It rained on us pretty much all the way up I–29 to the Iowa border. During the 13 miles we were in Iowa before crossing the river at Nebraska City, it did not rain. At Lincoln, where we stopped for lunch at a Runza restaurant, it started raining again and did for a while as we headed west along I–80.
Originally we had a motel reservation at Ogallala in the western part of Nebraska, but we were reaching there by mid-afternoon, so we called and canceled that room and made a reservation for Rawlins, Wyoming, the same motel we had stayed in last Sunday. All they had available, unfortunately, was a smoking room, which we took but later regretted.
We stopped for supper at a Wendy's in Laramie, Wyoming. As we were pulling onto the highway again, I observed that we were now 700 miles away from Rachael and was overtaken by such a sense of sadness, an emptiness, that she was now so far away from home. We will miss her a lot.
It was about 9:00, thirteen hours after we left Kansas City, when we pulled into our Sleep Inn in Rawlins. The stench in the smoking room we were put in was pretty bad and caused everything we took into the room to smell. Eliza had a hard time sleeping because of it.
Saturday, July 29, 2000
Wyoming, Utah
We awoke right at 6:00, ate our breakfast, and were on the road toward home by 6:40. At Little America we stopped to buy 35¢ ice cream cones and fill the car with gas. After we reached Utah, we took I–84 down Weber Canyon, then south on US 89, and then I–15 to Bountiful. Mom called us on the cell phone as we were passing Farmington, and Camilla and I each talked to her until we were on 500 West in Bountiful. Our intent was to surprise her; she wasn't expecting us until this evening. Finally, she asked where we were, and I gave a vague enough answer that she was totally surprised when we walked in the door only moments later. It was 11:00 and our trip was over.
According to our odometer, our house is 1,100 miles from the Kieffers' house in Kansas City by the route we took home. During the 2,869 miles of our trip, we saw license plates from 40 states (we were missing Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and West Virginia) and 4 Canadian provinces (we saw Alberta, British Colombia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan). Our highest elevation was 8,640 feet on I–80 at Laramie Pass in Wyoming. Our lowest was probably when we crossed the Missouri River at Kansas City. We stayed in four different motels (in Rawlins, Scottsbluff, Omaha, and again in Rawlins) and spent $245.70 for lodging. We stopped 10 times for gas and spent $123.38 for fuel. We spent about $165 on food and about $30 on other stuff. We traveled through parts of six states (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri). And Eliza read aloud all but 30 pages of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It was a wonderful trip.
Friday, July 21, 2000
Utah, Idaho
Our adventure began about 5:00 this afternoon—just two hours after our original target—as our three cars pulled onto northbound I–15 at Layton: Rachael and Camilla in Rachael's blue Geo Prism, Eliza and I in our green Saturn, and Michael, Meghan, and Caleb in their tan Honda Accord. Traffic thinned out somewhere north of Ogden, probably near Willard Bay, which is about where the battery failed on one of our new walkie-talkies (we hadn't been sure it was fully charged), which we were using between our car and Rachael's.
After we crossed into Idaho and Eliza had to endure my awful rendition of "Here We Have Idaho," we called Mom on the cell phone to report we were in a new state. She and Mary were staying home in Bountiful because of Mary's dizzy spells. Shauna and Jacob were in Layton. Cade, Rebecca, and Mimi starting today were spending a week at a condo near Eden. Talmage and Carisa were at Lake Powell. And Anna is in Ephraim working at Snow College for the summer.
By 7:00 we reached Lava Hot Springs, a little resort town ten or eleven miles east of I–15 on US 30. With two or three exceptions, we have come here every July since 1980 to stay in our condo at Hot Springs Village. This year we are only staying a couple days.
About 7:20 all of us but Rachael went swimming in the big pool. It was not crowded, and Meghan and Caleb especially enjoyed going down the slide, mostly on Eliza's lap, occasionally on Camilla's, never by themselves. Meanwhile, Rachael had gone to Shawn's Market to buy food for supper and had macaroni and cheese, rolls, and a berry drink ready for us when we returned from swimming.
Michael and I, still in our wet swimsuits, went quickly to the store to get hotdogs and sherbet to add to Rachael's supper and also fixings for breakfast.
I slept alone in the big bed on the east end of our unit. Michael, Meghan, and Caleb, who started out in the bunk beds, ended up sleeping on the floor at the foot of my bed. Rachael and Camilla each slept on one of the hide-a-beds in the west end. Eliza slept on the bottom bunk.
Saturday, July 22, 2000
Idaho
This morning Eliza and I took Meghan and Caleb for a walk along the Portneuf River that runs through town and back along Lava's Main Street. By the end we were carrying them on our shoulders.
Knowing there was a Pioneer Day parade sometime this weekend, we tried to find out when. A kid in one of the shops on Main Street thought it was today at 4:00, 5:00, or 6:00. The lady in the grocery store thought it was tomorrow at 5:00. And Gerri in the condo office thought it was either at 10:00 this morning or 6:00 this evening, having been told those alternative times, she said, by someone who was actually going to be in the parade. It turned out to be at 6:00 this evening.
Back at the condo, after our walk, Eliza and I fixed waffles, scrambled eggs, and orange juice for breakfast. Camilla cleaned up afterward.We had a pretty lazy day, which is what Lava for us is all about. We spent time reading, playing pool and other games at the club house, playing on the swings and other outdoor toys with Meghan and Caleb, watching TV, and such. Caleb likes the trains that rumble by several times a day, just like his daddy did 20 years ago.
This afternoon we went to the ice cream parlor on Main Street, Smitty's Sweet Shop. Caleb, who had the smallest cone possible, was a dripping mess by the time he had eaten all he wanted of his. Sitting in the air-conditioned shop, eating our ice cream, was a welcome break from the oppressive heat outside. It was a hot one (97 degrees we heard on the news tonight, 103 degrees down in Salt Lake, where poor Mom was tending house with a broken air conditioner that won't get fixed until next Wednesday at soonest).
Michael, Meghan, and Caleb left for home at 3:15, as soon as we had finished at the ice cream store. Shauna had called earlier to see how everyone was doing and to mention her dad had driven up this morning in a minivan and took away their old red car. Wow!
The four of us remaining—Rachael, Camilla, Eliza, and I—played pool, fixed shredded potatoes and hot dogs for supper, went to the little parade (actually just Eliza and I went to the 10-minute parade), and drove out to historic Chesterfield, now a ghost town with some of its buildings well preserved. It was founded in 1880 by settlers from Davis County who were finding Utah getting too crowded. We walked through the cemetery, which is well kept, and looked at headstones. Many of the same surnames seen in the Bountiful cemetery were here: Call, Hatch, Holbrook, Sessions, Muir. The earliest birth date we could find was 1822. The earliest death date 1888. The most recent burial 1998.
Back in Lava, we stopped at Shawn's Market to buy ice and provisions for our travels tomorrow.
Several times during the day we talked with Mom on our cell phone. This way she gets to share in the journey without having to ride in the car or endure the summer heat (except she is doing that at home anyway with a broken air conditioner). She doesn't do heat well.
Sunday, July 23, 2000
Idaho, Wyoming
We awoke, ate breakfast, got ready for church, and at 10:00 attended sacrament meeting in the Lava Hot Springs Ward. We returned to our condo, packed and cleaned up, ate lunch, and at 1:15 headed east on US 30 toward Soda Springs.
We decided we wanted to see Star Valley, which we'd never been to before, so we headed north out of Soda Springs on state highway 34, a scenic drive that took us north and east into Wyoming near Freedom. We headed south on US 89 through Thayne, Grover, Afton, and Smoot. We reached an elevation of 7,630 feet crossing the Salt River Pass before slipping back into Idaho briefly and then back into Wyoming for the rest of the day.
At Border, Wyoming, we rejoined US 30 and followed it south to Cokeville, east to Kemmerer (the home of J.C. Penney), and southeast to I–80, which we then traveled along past Little America, Green River, and Rock Springs to Rawlins, where we spent the might at the Sleep Inn. The air conditioning had been knocked out by a lightening storm a couple days earlier, so we were given an additional discount off our room. We ate sandwiches, Jell-o, pop, and cookies in our room. Eliza and I went for a walk at sunset.
We arrived in Rawlins about 7:30, a little over six hours after leaving Lava. Camilla and Rachael drove in one car, Eliza and I in the other. We used our walkie-talkies to communicate with each other. Eliza read me chapters from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as we traveled. Anna called us from Michael and Shauna's house just as we were approaching the tunnel by Green River. We talked to Mom a couple of times. She informed us that Uncle Irv, my dad's twin brother, had died Friday. He was 85.
Monday, July 24, 2000
Wyoming, Nebraska
Pioneer Day, which we spent at Martin's Cove, Devils Gate, Independence Rock, and Scotts Bluff—all important landmarks along the Oregon, California, and Mormon pioneer trails.
We ate breakfast at the Sleep Inn, filled the cars with expensive gas ($1.65 a gallon), and headed north out of Rawlins on US 287. Not far out of town we waited for about 20 minutes because of road construction. At Lamont we stopped to take pictures of the sign saying "Lamont, Population 3."
Camilla, Eliza, and I had been to Martin's Cove with Mom and Mary three years ago, during the pioneer sesquicentennial. This was Rachael’s first visit. We went through the visitor center, watched a brief film about the experiences of a boy in the Martin Handcart Company of 1856, pulled a handcart out to the Veil Crossing, walked over to Devils Gate, and returned the handcart (with my riding while the three girls pulled me) back to the parking lot.
Next we drove 10 miles or so further east to Independence Rock. Rachael and Camilla waited at the rest stop at the bottom while Eliza and I climbed to the top. (Eliza had been on top of Ensign Peak on Independence Day and now Independence Rock on Pioneer Day.) From the top we called Mom at home and used our walkie-talkies to communicate with Rachael and Camilla at the bottom.
We then continued on to Casper, the second largest city in Wyoming, where we stopped to eat at a Pizza Hut and where Rachael made comments in front of our waitress about how ugly Wyoming was. We then headed south on I–25 until US 26 took off east toward Nebraska. We arrived in Scottsbluff a little before 6:00 and checked into our room at the Comfort Inn.
This evening we drove out to Scotts Bluff National Monument, where Donna Davey, one of the park rangers, was very kind in helping us. She let us drive the mile and a half to the top, although it was nearly time to close the road for the evening, and was most helpful when we returned back to the visitor center. She even gave us helpful hints on where to eat and how best to drive back to our motel.
On the way back, as we were driving through Gering, we stopped to eat at a Runza restaurant, famous throughout Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Colorado for its Runza sandwich, which has German–Russian roots stretching back to the 18th century. The unique blend of fresh ground beef, cabbage, onions, and special spices baked inside home-made bread has been passed down for generations and debuted commercially in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1949, the year I was born. Rachael had a Swiss and mushroom Runza sandwich, I had a tossed salad, and Camilla and Eliza had cheese and broccoli soup and milkshakes.
Hyde Frederickson called tonight to report that Jack White in our ward died this evening. He had lain down for a nap and was gone by two hours later when Helen went in to wake him up for dinner. [I was serving as bishop at the time and felt bad I was not there to assist Helen and her family and even contemplated ways I could abort the trip and get back to Utah. I also wanted to be home for my Uncle Irv's funeral, but in the end I missed both funerals.]
Tuesday, July 25, 2000
Nebraska
This morning, after getting ready for the day and eating our standard continental breakfast, we were on our way again. Just east of Scottsbluff we stopped alongside the Burlington Northern tracks to see the grave site of Rebecca Winters, a pioneer woman who died at age 50 from cholera as she was traveling with her family along the Mormon Pioneer Trail. I believe she is an ancestor of my uncle, Dean Winters.
We continued a few miles more until reaching Chimney Rock, probably the most famous landmark along the pioneer trails. We had our National Park passport, which we had purchased the night before, stamped and saw a film in the visitor center and bought postcards.
We then turned north on US 385 toward Alliance, where we went to Carhenge a few miles north of town. Thirteen years ago the people who owned the farm decided at a family reunion to build an exact replica (as to size, dimensions, and orientation) of England's famous Stonehenge but out of cars instead of stones. Interesting.
We took pictures, returned to Alliance, ate lunch at McDonald's, and headed east along Nebraska highway 2 through the beautiful and isolated Sand Hills country. We passed successively through or by little towns represented by dots on the map: Antioch, Lakeside, Ellsworth, Bingham, Ashby, Hyannis, Whitman, Mullen, Seneca, Thedford, Halsey, Dunning, Anselmo, Merna—many of them so small they didn't even have the water towers or grain elevators common to Midwestern towns.
Mullen, one of the larger towns with 500-some people, located near the Middle Loup River at the intersection of highways 2 and 97, is the only town in all of Hooker County. Another 200 people live scattered on farms throughout the rest of the county. Just east of Mullen, at the county line, we crossed from the mountain into the central time zone.
At Broken Bow we stopped for gas and a snack. Less than 20 miles further, at Ansley, we turned off highway 2 onto 92, with a clear shot east (through half a dozen more counties) to Omaha. This portion of the trip was through lovely rolling farm country rather than the rolling grasslands of the Sand Hills region. Loup City, Ashton, Farewell, St. Paul, Osceola, Shelby, Rising City, Wahoo were the towns we passed. A gorgeous sunset was at our backs at Wahoo.
It was dark by the time we reached our Comfort Inn in Omaha. We had spent the entire day traveling the back roads of Nebraska, not once coming anywhere near an Interstate, and it had been a wonderful day. We ate a late supper in our motel room with take-out from an Arby's restaurant.
Wednesday, July 26, 2000
Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri
Every other day the girls switch cars: Eliza rode with me on Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday; Camilla rode with me on Monday and again today.
This morning we visited the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters, a lovely new visitor center built since our last visit here seven years ago when we were taking Rachael to Peace College in North Carolina. In the center we met a Sister Wakefield, a niece of Garth Wakefield, who works with me in the Missionary Department. We also met an Elder and Sister Ross Williams, whom we knew in Rose Park 24 years ago. After taking the tour of the center and watching a film about the Saints' stay at Winter Quarters in 1846–47, we walked through the peaceful pioneer cemetery and saw the new temple under construction next to the cemetery. It is supposed to be completed by the end of the year.
Back on I–680, we drove across the Mormon Memorial Bridge into Iowa, joined I–29 and headed south into Council Bluffs, where we found the reconstructed Kanesville Tabernacle, where Brigham Young was first sustained as the second President of the Church, with Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards as his counselors in the First Presidency, at a special conference on December 27, 1847. Elder Williams, whom we had seen over in Winter Quarters, was our tour guide. He let Camilla and me play an old organ—over a hundred years old, he said—in the tabernacle.
We ate lunch at a Blimpie restaurant up the street, got gas, found I–80, and headed back across the Missouri River into Nebraska. Back in Omaha, we headed south on US 75 down the eastern edge of Nebraska rather than driving on I–29 down the western edge of Iowa. The Missouri River forms the boundary between the two states.
South of Nebraska City, we turned off US 75 onto state highways 128, then 67, to find the little town of Talmage, population 246, and took pictures. (There is also a Talmage in Kansas that has only 126 people living in it.)
We returned to US 75 and at Auburn turned east on US 136, crossed the river into Missouri, and headed south another 100 miles or so on I–29 to Kansas City. From our visit here last summer, we were able to drive straight to the Kieffers' house at NW Adrian Terrace, which is just off I–29 at exit 5. Mom and Dad Kieffer are in Utah this week, Kenny had left for work at 3:30, and Kathryn was supposed to have been home from work by 5:00. It was about 6:45 when we arrived, and Rachael went through the garage, which was not locked, and peeked her head in the door into the house, which was not locked, calling for Kathryn, who was not home, and set off the burglar alarm, which was not turned off.
So we waited outside. Half an hour later two policemen showed up in a squad car to see if everything was OK. We explained the situation and apparently looked honest, and they were nice about it, but had we been actual burglars we could have hauled away a lot of the house before they arrived. We waited some more. A friend of Kathryn's came by and knew how to turn the alarm off, so we were able to wait inside the house. She said Kathryn had gone shopping with a friend. We waited some more. Still no Kathryn, so finally we wrote her a note with our cell number on it, and we went to eat dinner at an Applebee's. Kathryn was home when we got back, and we sat up visiting until midnight.
Severe thunderstorms moved across the Kansas City metro area and put on quite a spectacular light show, reminiscent of our visit here last year when lightening knocked down their neighbor's tree. (This afternoon, when we were still in southeastern Nebraska, we had heard on the radio tornado watches for southeastern Nebraska and southwestern Iowa, although the weather looked fine to us at the time.)
Uncle Irv's funeral was held today in Woods Cross.
Thursday, July 27, 2000
Missouri
Tonight, sitting in the Kieffers' living room in Kansas City, I finished reading one of my birthday books, Larry McMurtry's Roads: Driving America's Great Highways. I share McMurtry's passions for books and the road (he lists a third: women) and have enjoyed both during this week's foray into middle America. Not only did I read Roads, but Eliza has been reading aloud from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as we made our way across the back roads of Wyoming and Nebraska.
In his final chapter, McMurtry writes, "Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women, which was that there are just too many nice ones. . . .
"As it is with women, so it is with roads. There are too many nice ones. I could go on for a long time, driving America's roads. I could see the sandhills of Nebraska, follow the old Oregon Trail along the North Platte, see the Tetons, dodge moose in Maine, slip down to Salt Lake City and remind myself what an inspired city planner Brigham Young had been.
"But I can't drive all the roads. On even the narrowest highways that I've driven on these trips, and in even the smallest towns, there are signs pointing down even narrower highways to even smaller towns, many of which I will never see."
Something like that thought occurred to me yesterday afternoon as we were pushing south along US 75 in eastern Nebraska. Our fourth child and second son is named Talmage. We knew from our road atlas that a little town named Talmage, population 246, was in these parts.
As we were looking for Talmage, we overshot our intended turn off by a few miles, so turned instead onto a little paved road that after a half mile turned into "a rock road," so called by the friendly farmer from Talmage who stopped to see if we needed help as we sat at roadside studying the atlas. He wondered who we were visiting in Talmage and, after explaining our purpose in visiting there, explained that we could indeed arrive there along the rock road (what I would call a dirt or gravel road) that his tractor was planning to follow but suggested we go back and take the regular road instead. "Maybe I'll see you there," was his parting comment. He seemed so helpful, I was almost surprised we weren't invited for supper.
We backtracked to state highway 128, one of those narrower roads that lead to even smaller towns that McMurtry referred to, and I thought of all the myriads of little roads like this that crisscross the places people call home. After a few miles heading west, we turned south on state highway 67 and after another couple miles had to take an even narrower road, a half-mile spur that led to the little town. Talmage. Like so many other towns we've seen here in the Midwest, the name was proudly emblazoned on the town's water tower, as if water towers wandered off or were misplaced and had to be returned from time to time to their rightful owners.
Today was a rest day. It was afternoon by the time we were ready to go find the Liberty Jail visitor center and deliver a package of pamphlets from Winter Quarters. We took the tour at Liberty Jail, where Joseph Smith and his companions were in prison during the cold winter of 1838–39 and where some of the most sublime revelations were given to the Prophet.
We then drove back to Independence in Jackson County and visited the home of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States. He was the president when I was born in 1949 and Claudia in 1951. The guided tours through the home are limited to only eight people at a time. We were the last tour of the day.
Afterward we drove by the Truman Library eight blocks away, the temple and other world headquarters sites of the RLDS Church, the LDS visitor center, and the National Historic Trails site (which had just closed for the day).
We drove back to the Kieffers' house in Platte County, and Kathryn had dinner ready for us. Rachael and Kathryn went off to an Institute class this evening. Camilla, Eliza, and I caught up on journals, read, and such. I finished reading Roads: Driving America's Great Highways.
Friday, July 28, 2000
Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming
Today we headed home. We told Rachael good-bye and took off. She was standing in the Kieffers' driveway as we left, looking pretty sad, reminding us of an August afternoon seven years ago when we left her bawling in a parking lot at Peace College.
It rained on us pretty much all the way up I–29 to the Iowa border. During the 13 miles we were in Iowa before crossing the river at Nebraska City, it did not rain. At Lincoln, where we stopped for lunch at a Runza restaurant, it started raining again and did for a while as we headed west along I–80.
Originally we had a motel reservation at Ogallala in the western part of Nebraska, but we were reaching there by mid-afternoon, so we called and canceled that room and made a reservation for Rawlins, Wyoming, the same motel we had stayed in last Sunday. All they had available, unfortunately, was a smoking room, which we took but later regretted.
We stopped for supper at a Wendy's in Laramie, Wyoming. As we were pulling onto the highway again, I observed that we were now 700 miles away from Rachael and was overtaken by such a sense of sadness, an emptiness, that she was now so far away from home. We will miss her a lot.
It was about 9:00, thirteen hours after we left Kansas City, when we pulled into our Sleep Inn in Rawlins. The stench in the smoking room we were put in was pretty bad and caused everything we took into the room to smell. Eliza had a hard time sleeping because of it.
Saturday, July 29, 2000
Wyoming, Utah
We awoke right at 6:00, ate our breakfast, and were on the road toward home by 6:40. At Little America we stopped to buy 35¢ ice cream cones and fill the car with gas. After we reached Utah, we took I–84 down Weber Canyon, then south on US 89, and then I–15 to Bountiful. Mom called us on the cell phone as we were passing Farmington, and Camilla and I each talked to her until we were on 500 West in Bountiful. Our intent was to surprise her; she wasn't expecting us until this evening. Finally, she asked where we were, and I gave a vague enough answer that she was totally surprised when we walked in the door only moments later. It was 11:00 and our trip was over.
According to our odometer, our house is 1,100 miles from the Kieffers' house in Kansas City by the route we took home. During the 2,869 miles of our trip, we saw license plates from 40 states (we were missing Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and West Virginia) and 4 Canadian provinces (we saw Alberta, British Colombia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan). Our highest elevation was 8,640 feet on I–80 at Laramie Pass in Wyoming. Our lowest was probably when we crossed the Missouri River at Kansas City. We stayed in four different motels (in Rawlins, Scottsbluff, Omaha, and again in Rawlins) and spent $245.70 for lodging. We stopped 10 times for gas and spent $123.38 for fuel. We spent about $165 on food and about $30 on other stuff. We traveled through parts of six states (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri). And Eliza read aloud all but 30 pages of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It was a wonderful trip.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
123,456 miles!
Sunday evening, after we had returned from church and ate our dinner, Claudia and I went for a ride in our old 1998 Ford Windstar minivan. We took the back roads through Bountiful and Centerville to Farmington and drove by the house where Chris and Camilla lived for a while when they were house sitting for a missionary couple. We also drove by the historic rock home on the corner of 100 East and 500 North where my grandmother used to live after she married Harry Pledger. And by the old rock church where the first Primary was organized.
Less than a mile later, while still in Farmington, we pulled over to the side of the street we were on and took this picture of our odometer showing that our car had traveled 123,456 miles.
Not quite as far as the 222,222 miles Talmage's Saturn has traveled, but just as classy.
Less than a mile later, while still in Farmington, we pulled over to the side of the street we were on and took this picture of our odometer showing that our car had traveled 123,456 miles.
Not quite as far as the 222,222 miles Talmage's Saturn has traveled, but just as classy.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
A trip to Washington
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Utah, Idaho
At 11:00 I left in our pickup and drove the the 100 miles to Rachael's house in Malad. Robert was there and had someone there preparing an estimate on moving them at the end of the month to Illinois. After he left and Robert returned to the hospital, Rachael finished getting ready and packed her minivan while I kept track of little Margaret.
At 1:15, after asking a blessing on our trip, we left Malad, heading north on I-15 to Pocatello, west on I-86 and then I-84 to Nampa. We reached Boise at 5:15 and about half an hour later Dale and LeAnn's house in Nampa. Other than the persistent "Are we there yet?" the girls were reasonable travelers for a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and a 21-month-old.
Dale had arranged the Idaho family to get together to see us: Lyle and a lady friend named Doris, Jackie and Jared, and Cheryl and four of her children (LaWanda and her husband Terry, Bobbie, Gena, and Ronnie and his baby Roxie). Gene was up in the mountains working on their cabin. There were 17 of us who went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Dale told the server that we were celebrating my birthday, so at the end of the meal she brought me a free dessert (fried ice cream), and the workers and other patrons sang "Happy Birthday" to me.
We returned home to Dale and LeAnn's house, and everyone else left except Jackie and Jared, and we played six rounds of a card game called Skip Bo, then went to bed.
Friday, July 3
Idaho, Oregon, Washington
LeAnn fixed us breakfast, and we ate, packed, and hit the road a little after 9:00. Kind of. We actually drove around the Nampa area to take pictures of where I went to high school, the farm house we lived in 50 years ago when my family first moved to Idaho, Scism School (where I attended fourth, fifth, and sixth grades), and the final house we lived in on Ventura Drive. We then drove through downtown Nampa and got on the freeway but exited a few exits later toward Greenleaf, Roswell, and Adrian. We saw the farm where I lived the first decade of my life, the school I attended in Adrian, the Owyhee Ward building, and the stake center in Nyssa where I was baptized. We drove past Ontario, where I was born, and got on I-84 again and headed west.
It was the first time Claudia, Esther, and Margaret had been to Oregon.
We stopped two or three times at rest stops, traveled through the beautiful Blue Mountains, and stopped in Pendleton for gas and lunch. We ate at a local restaurant called Roosters. While at the restaurant we talked on the phone to Camilla and to Mom, then the battery died on my phone. Rachael's battery also died. We were traveling just like in the olden days without any contact with the rest of the world.
We left I-84 and took I-82 crossing the Columba River at Umatilla, and headed north and west through Washington until we joined I-90 and headed due west. It was the first time the girls had been to Washington.
We did a few more rest stops before leaving the Cascades and coming into the Seattle area. We headed north on I-405 and then I-5 to Everett. We wondered how we'd contact Chris and Camilla to get into their apartment complex, but we saw their bakery was still open and stopped there. I had forgotten that during the summer they extended their store hours from 6:00 to 8:00 in the evening. Chris, Camilla, and Sam were there and fed us sandwiches for dinner as they were getting ready to close their store at 8:00. We, the girls especially, were glad to be through traveling. After closing the store, we went over to the apartment and then Chris took Rachael to the motel on Evergreen Way that she and the girls are staying at. I stayed with Chris, Camilla, and Sam.
Saturday, July 4
Washington
Today is the birthday of our country. Late this morning Camilla, Sam, Rachael, Claudia Sue, Esther, Margaret, and I went to the Everett Station and took a free shuttle bus from there to watch an 11:00 Fourth of July parade. Chris isn't much into parades and stayed home. The parade was much more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than we might have seen in Utah. I don't think we'll anytime soon see belly dancers, for example, in the Handcart Days parade. At the end of the parade, as we were walking back to catch our shuttle, I bought ice cream for the children. We returned to the apartment, ate lunch, and rested.
This afternoon Camilla took all of us but Chris and Margaret, who was still sleeping, to a beach on the Puget Sound. We went through a beautiful, dense forest to get to it. The tide was in so there was actually not much beach, but the children all had fun playing in the surf. It was the first time Claudia and Esther had seen the ocean. They collected a number of seashells.
Chris had dinner nearly ready when we returned, and Margaret had just awakened a bit before.
In the evening we drove to Lake Stephens to watch fireworks. The light of a nearly full moon shimmering across the lake presented a picturesque setting, and fireworks were being set off all around the lake for the more than an hour and a half we were there. It was impressive, something like watching twenty different fireworks displays all at once. I had never seen anything quite like it.
Sunday, July 5
Washington
This morning, beginning at 10:50, we attended church in the Mukilteo Ward. Sunday School was first, followed by a combined priesthood/Relief Society opening exercises of the two wards that share the building (something to do, they explained, with a part of the building being remodeled), followed by Chris going to elders quorum, Rachael to Relief Society, and me to high priests group. We then concluded with fast and testimony meeting.
We returned to Chris and Camilla's to visit, nap, play games, and such. Late in the afternoon all of us but Chris and sleeping Margaret went on a walk around the neighborhood and ended by dropping by the bakery (what Sam calls "Daddy's work") to pick up some mayonnaise for dinner and chocolate chips to make cookies afterward. After dinner Claudia and Esther helped clean up the kitchen and table and load the dishwasher so they could help Chris make chocolate chip cookies. After playing games, Rachael and the girls returned to their motel.
Monday, July 6
Washington
Around noon Chris took Rachael, Claudia Sue, Esther, Margaret, Sam, and me to the Forest Park petting zoo. The children enjoyed the animals. It was an overcast day and tried raining on us a couple times. In the evening Camilla took Rachael and her girls swimming in an indoor swimming pool in another apartment complex owned by the same company as hers. I went along to take pictures with Rachael's camera. The water was cold, but everyone had fun.
Tuesday, July 7
Washington
We took the children to a free movie at the mall, Kung Fu Panda. Rachael bought us popcorn. I made arrangements to go visit Dana Blackham and his wife Wednesday evening in their home in Edmonds. Dane and I had been missionary companions in Brazil, roommates back at BYU, and he was the bestman at our wedding. His wife Linda had died some years ago, and he married Becky, much to the opposition of his children and family. It has been many years since we have seen each other.
In the afternoon Rachael and I took the children on a drive to Snoqualmie Falls. We took a scenic route to get there (along U.S. 2 and state highways 202 and 203), and the children all fell asleep. The falls were very impressive. We bought ice cream to eat, and Rachael bought Robert a hat and a very expensive $42 T-shirt. She did not know how much it would cost until after it was rung up by the cashier. We took a different scenic route back to Everett. Washington is certainly a beautiful place.
It was Vince's birthday back in Utah. This evening we called to wish him a happy birthday and got only his answering machine, so we all sang a voice message to him.
We then bought sandwiches at Chris and Camilla's bakery and had a picnic at the park by Silver Lake. After eating and playing on the playground equipment, we fed ducks in the lake.
Wednesday, July 8
Washington
I left around 7:00 to drive to the airport to pick Claudia up. Her plane from Salt Lake City arrived earlier than scheduled, but I was still there in time to park and greet her as she came out of the gate area. It was good to have her join us.
We drove back to Everett and took the children to another free movie at the mall, The Tale of Despereaux. Rachael again bought us popcorn. Southwest Airlines is having a sale, and in the afternoon Claudia and I arranged a trip in September to go visit Paul, Eliza, Peter, and Aaron in Atlanta. Just after I had purchased the tickets, Claudia realized it would be right around the time when Anna's baby is due, and she was regretting our decision to go the weekend she had selected.
In the evening Claudia and I drove to Edmonds to have dinner with Dana and Becky Blackham. It was a wonderful evening catching up on twenty or so years of not being in touch. We did not return to Chris and Camilla's until midnight. Rachael, Camilla, and the children had gone bowling while we were gone.
Thursday, July 9
Washington
Camilla had the day off work, and she went with us to a free children's concert in the park at Silver Lake featuring a group called Recess Monkeys. We enjoyed that, and Rachael bought their DVD which Claudia Sue and Esther enjoyed watching over and over the whole rest of the week. We bought lunch from the bakery.
In the evening we drove out to Lake Stephens, where Chris and Camilla were participating in the farmer's market there and where a bluegrass concert was being held. We bought and ate our supper at the farmer's market. It was a delightful evening.
Friday, July 10
Washington
Claudia and I went to exercise at the Gold's Gym in Everett. Later Claudia, Rachael, and I took the children on a long car ride. We headed up I-5 past Mount Vernon and exited the freeway at Burlington and headed west on highway 20 toward Anacortes and Deception Pass, where we crossed a bridge onto the north end of Whidbey Island. It was very scenic, but all of the children were alseep at that point, so we didn't actually stop and get out of the car. We drove down the length of Whidbey Island and took a ferry from Clinton to Mukilteo.
We bought a late lunch at a Wendy's and returned to Chris and Camilla's apartment. Rachael took Claudia Sue and Esther to Mountlake Terrace to visit with one of her online mothers' group friends. Margaret was sick and stayed with the rest of us.
Claudia and I bought a loaf of Dakota bread from the bakery and took it as a thank-you gift to Dana and Becky Blackham. Becky had mentioned Wednesday night it was her favorite bread from Great Harvest.
Saturday, July 11
Washington
Sam's third birthday. Before Sam woke up and before Rachael and her girls came over, Claudia and I went to exercise at the Gold's Gym in Mukilteo. It was a much nicer facility. After breakfast Sam opened his presents, one of which was a little aquarium and a Beta fish that he named Bruce.
In the late morning and into the afternoon we went to Jettey Island. It is a small manmade island that is accessible only by a free passenger ferry. There are no roads on the island. We ate a picnic lunch while we were waiting for our turn to go on the ferry over to the island. The tide was way out as we played on the beach. We saw a lot of wind surfers. I counted over twenty at one point. Little Margaret seemed to have the most fun playing in the little puddles of water on the sandy beach. Claudia Sue and Sam took naps, and Esther rested but never actually fell asleep. Rachael's girls were feeling sick and had fevers by tonight.
Sunday, July 12
Washington, Oregon, Idaho
This morning Rachael, Claudia Sue, Esther, Margaret, and I left for home. This was likely the last time Rachael and Camilla will see each other for a very long time, unless they both happen to be visiting Utah at the same time. Chris and Camilla will probably not get to southern Illinois anytime soon, and Robert and Rachael will probably not visit western Washington anytime soon.
Claudia stayed for the rest of the day, went to church with Chris and Camilla, and caught an evening flight home to Salt Lake. Both she and Camilla reported that Sam was very sad when he got up and found that Grandpa and his cousins/friends were gone. (Throughout the week Sam had variously referred to Claudia Sue, Esther, and Margaret as his cousins and his new friends.) He had enjoyed the week immensely.
After asking a blessing on our return trip, we left Everett at 7:00 (8:00 Mountain time) and reached Malad about 9:40 in the evening. A long day of driving.
It rained on us as we crossed through the Cascade Mountains in Washington and again from about the Oregon-Idaho border until past Boise, where it came down very hard. We were buffeted by strong winds all across eastern Oregon. We saw rainbows—always a good omen—as we drove across southern Idaho approaching Pocatello. We had stopped for lunch at a beautiful rest stop in the Blue Mountains and took breaks at a couple of rest stops elsewhere along the way. The girls were good travelers. Because they were sick, they slept a lot of the way. We didn't hear a single "Are we there yet?" until we were half way across the state of Idaho.
It was late enough when we reached Malad that I decided to spend the night rather than driving alone the remaining hour and a half back to Bountiful.
We had been recording license plates throughout our trip and had seen cars from 39 states and 5 Canadian provinces during the 1,700-plus miles we had driven from Malad up into the Pacific Northwest. (According to Google Maps, it is 813 miles from Rachael's house in Malad to Camilla's house in Everett.)
Monday, July 13
Idaho, Utah
This morning, after Rachael fixed me some breakfast, I left her house about 9:30 and reached Bountiful at 11:00, the same hour I had left Bountiful eleven days earlier to begin the trip.
Utah, Idaho
At 11:00 I left in our pickup and drove the the 100 miles to Rachael's house in Malad. Robert was there and had someone there preparing an estimate on moving them at the end of the month to Illinois. After he left and Robert returned to the hospital, Rachael finished getting ready and packed her minivan while I kept track of little Margaret.
At 1:15, after asking a blessing on our trip, we left Malad, heading north on I-15 to Pocatello, west on I-86 and then I-84 to Nampa. We reached Boise at 5:15 and about half an hour later Dale and LeAnn's house in Nampa. Other than the persistent "Are we there yet?" the girls were reasonable travelers for a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and a 21-month-old.
Dale had arranged the Idaho family to get together to see us: Lyle and a lady friend named Doris, Jackie and Jared, and Cheryl and four of her children (LaWanda and her husband Terry, Bobbie, Gena, and Ronnie and his baby Roxie). Gene was up in the mountains working on their cabin. There were 17 of us who went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Dale told the server that we were celebrating my birthday, so at the end of the meal she brought me a free dessert (fried ice cream), and the workers and other patrons sang "Happy Birthday" to me.
We returned home to Dale and LeAnn's house, and everyone else left except Jackie and Jared, and we played six rounds of a card game called Skip Bo, then went to bed.
Friday, July 3
Idaho, Oregon, Washington
LeAnn fixed us breakfast, and we ate, packed, and hit the road a little after 9:00. Kind of. We actually drove around the Nampa area to take pictures of where I went to high school, the farm house we lived in 50 years ago when my family first moved to Idaho, Scism School (where I attended fourth, fifth, and sixth grades), and the final house we lived in on Ventura Drive. We then drove through downtown Nampa and got on the freeway but exited a few exits later toward Greenleaf, Roswell, and Adrian. We saw the farm where I lived the first decade of my life, the school I attended in Adrian, the Owyhee Ward building, and the stake center in Nyssa where I was baptized. We drove past Ontario, where I was born, and got on I-84 again and headed west.
It was the first time Claudia, Esther, and Margaret had been to Oregon.
We stopped two or three times at rest stops, traveled through the beautiful Blue Mountains, and stopped in Pendleton for gas and lunch. We ate at a local restaurant called Roosters. While at the restaurant we talked on the phone to Camilla and to Mom, then the battery died on my phone. Rachael's battery also died. We were traveling just like in the olden days without any contact with the rest of the world.
We left I-84 and took I-82 crossing the Columba River at Umatilla, and headed north and west through Washington until we joined I-90 and headed due west. It was the first time the girls had been to Washington.
We did a few more rest stops before leaving the Cascades and coming into the Seattle area. We headed north on I-405 and then I-5 to Everett. We wondered how we'd contact Chris and Camilla to get into their apartment complex, but we saw their bakery was still open and stopped there. I had forgotten that during the summer they extended their store hours from 6:00 to 8:00 in the evening. Chris, Camilla, and Sam were there and fed us sandwiches for dinner as they were getting ready to close their store at 8:00. We, the girls especially, were glad to be through traveling. After closing the store, we went over to the apartment and then Chris took Rachael to the motel on Evergreen Way that she and the girls are staying at. I stayed with Chris, Camilla, and Sam.
Saturday, July 4
Washington
Today is the birthday of our country. Late this morning Camilla, Sam, Rachael, Claudia Sue, Esther, Margaret, and I went to the Everett Station and took a free shuttle bus from there to watch an 11:00 Fourth of July parade. Chris isn't much into parades and stayed home. The parade was much more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than we might have seen in Utah. I don't think we'll anytime soon see belly dancers, for example, in the Handcart Days parade. At the end of the parade, as we were walking back to catch our shuttle, I bought ice cream for the children. We returned to the apartment, ate lunch, and rested.
This afternoon Camilla took all of us but Chris and Margaret, who was still sleeping, to a beach on the Puget Sound. We went through a beautiful, dense forest to get to it. The tide was in so there was actually not much beach, but the children all had fun playing in the surf. It was the first time Claudia and Esther had seen the ocean. They collected a number of seashells.
Chris had dinner nearly ready when we returned, and Margaret had just awakened a bit before.
In the evening we drove to Lake Stephens to watch fireworks. The light of a nearly full moon shimmering across the lake presented a picturesque setting, and fireworks were being set off all around the lake for the more than an hour and a half we were there. It was impressive, something like watching twenty different fireworks displays all at once. I had never seen anything quite like it.
Sunday, July 5
Washington
This morning, beginning at 10:50, we attended church in the Mukilteo Ward. Sunday School was first, followed by a combined priesthood/Relief Society opening exercises of the two wards that share the building (something to do, they explained, with a part of the building being remodeled), followed by Chris going to elders quorum, Rachael to Relief Society, and me to high priests group. We then concluded with fast and testimony meeting.
We returned to Chris and Camilla's to visit, nap, play games, and such. Late in the afternoon all of us but Chris and sleeping Margaret went on a walk around the neighborhood and ended by dropping by the bakery (what Sam calls "Daddy's work") to pick up some mayonnaise for dinner and chocolate chips to make cookies afterward. After dinner Claudia and Esther helped clean up the kitchen and table and load the dishwasher so they could help Chris make chocolate chip cookies. After playing games, Rachael and the girls returned to their motel.
Monday, July 6
Washington
Around noon Chris took Rachael, Claudia Sue, Esther, Margaret, Sam, and me to the Forest Park petting zoo. The children enjoyed the animals. It was an overcast day and tried raining on us a couple times. In the evening Camilla took Rachael and her girls swimming in an indoor swimming pool in another apartment complex owned by the same company as hers. I went along to take pictures with Rachael's camera. The water was cold, but everyone had fun.
Tuesday, July 7
Washington
We took the children to a free movie at the mall, Kung Fu Panda. Rachael bought us popcorn. I made arrangements to go visit Dana Blackham and his wife Wednesday evening in their home in Edmonds. Dane and I had been missionary companions in Brazil, roommates back at BYU, and he was the bestman at our wedding. His wife Linda had died some years ago, and he married Becky, much to the opposition of his children and family. It has been many years since we have seen each other.
In the afternoon Rachael and I took the children on a drive to Snoqualmie Falls. We took a scenic route to get there (along U.S. 2 and state highways 202 and 203), and the children all fell asleep. The falls were very impressive. We bought ice cream to eat, and Rachael bought Robert a hat and a very expensive $42 T-shirt. She did not know how much it would cost until after it was rung up by the cashier. We took a different scenic route back to Everett. Washington is certainly a beautiful place.
It was Vince's birthday back in Utah. This evening we called to wish him a happy birthday and got only his answering machine, so we all sang a voice message to him.
We then bought sandwiches at Chris and Camilla's bakery and had a picnic at the park by Silver Lake. After eating and playing on the playground equipment, we fed ducks in the lake.
Wednesday, July 8
Washington
I left around 7:00 to drive to the airport to pick Claudia up. Her plane from Salt Lake City arrived earlier than scheduled, but I was still there in time to park and greet her as she came out of the gate area. It was good to have her join us.
We drove back to Everett and took the children to another free movie at the mall, The Tale of Despereaux. Rachael again bought us popcorn. Southwest Airlines is having a sale, and in the afternoon Claudia and I arranged a trip in September to go visit Paul, Eliza, Peter, and Aaron in Atlanta. Just after I had purchased the tickets, Claudia realized it would be right around the time when Anna's baby is due, and she was regretting our decision to go the weekend she had selected.
In the evening Claudia and I drove to Edmonds to have dinner with Dana and Becky Blackham. It was a wonderful evening catching up on twenty or so years of not being in touch. We did not return to Chris and Camilla's until midnight. Rachael, Camilla, and the children had gone bowling while we were gone.
Thursday, July 9
Washington
Camilla had the day off work, and she went with us to a free children's concert in the park at Silver Lake featuring a group called Recess Monkeys. We enjoyed that, and Rachael bought their DVD which Claudia Sue and Esther enjoyed watching over and over the whole rest of the week. We bought lunch from the bakery.
In the evening we drove out to Lake Stephens, where Chris and Camilla were participating in the farmer's market there and where a bluegrass concert was being held. We bought and ate our supper at the farmer's market. It was a delightful evening.
Friday, July 10
Washington
Claudia and I went to exercise at the Gold's Gym in Everett. Later Claudia, Rachael, and I took the children on a long car ride. We headed up I-5 past Mount Vernon and exited the freeway at Burlington and headed west on highway 20 toward Anacortes and Deception Pass, where we crossed a bridge onto the north end of Whidbey Island. It was very scenic, but all of the children were alseep at that point, so we didn't actually stop and get out of the car. We drove down the length of Whidbey Island and took a ferry from Clinton to Mukilteo.
We bought a late lunch at a Wendy's and returned to Chris and Camilla's apartment. Rachael took Claudia Sue and Esther to Mountlake Terrace to visit with one of her online mothers' group friends. Margaret was sick and stayed with the rest of us.
Claudia and I bought a loaf of Dakota bread from the bakery and took it as a thank-you gift to Dana and Becky Blackham. Becky had mentioned Wednesday night it was her favorite bread from Great Harvest.
Saturday, July 11
Washington
Sam's third birthday. Before Sam woke up and before Rachael and her girls came over, Claudia and I went to exercise at the Gold's Gym in Mukilteo. It was a much nicer facility. After breakfast Sam opened his presents, one of which was a little aquarium and a Beta fish that he named Bruce.
In the late morning and into the afternoon we went to Jettey Island. It is a small manmade island that is accessible only by a free passenger ferry. There are no roads on the island. We ate a picnic lunch while we were waiting for our turn to go on the ferry over to the island. The tide was way out as we played on the beach. We saw a lot of wind surfers. I counted over twenty at one point. Little Margaret seemed to have the most fun playing in the little puddles of water on the sandy beach. Claudia Sue and Sam took naps, and Esther rested but never actually fell asleep. Rachael's girls were feeling sick and had fevers by tonight.
Sunday, July 12
Washington, Oregon, Idaho
This morning Rachael, Claudia Sue, Esther, Margaret, and I left for home. This was likely the last time Rachael and Camilla will see each other for a very long time, unless they both happen to be visiting Utah at the same time. Chris and Camilla will probably not get to southern Illinois anytime soon, and Robert and Rachael will probably not visit western Washington anytime soon.
Claudia stayed for the rest of the day, went to church with Chris and Camilla, and caught an evening flight home to Salt Lake. Both she and Camilla reported that Sam was very sad when he got up and found that Grandpa and his cousins/friends were gone. (Throughout the week Sam had variously referred to Claudia Sue, Esther, and Margaret as his cousins and his new friends.) He had enjoyed the week immensely.
After asking a blessing on our return trip, we left Everett at 7:00 (8:00 Mountain time) and reached Malad about 9:40 in the evening. A long day of driving.
It rained on us as we crossed through the Cascade Mountains in Washington and again from about the Oregon-Idaho border until past Boise, where it came down very hard. We were buffeted by strong winds all across eastern Oregon. We saw rainbows—always a good omen—as we drove across southern Idaho approaching Pocatello. We had stopped for lunch at a beautiful rest stop in the Blue Mountains and took breaks at a couple of rest stops elsewhere along the way. The girls were good travelers. Because they were sick, they slept a lot of the way. We didn't hear a single "Are we there yet?" until we were half way across the state of Idaho.
It was late enough when we reached Malad that I decided to spend the night rather than driving alone the remaining hour and a half back to Bountiful.
We had been recording license plates throughout our trip and had seen cars from 39 states and 5 Canadian provinces during the 1,700-plus miles we had driven from Malad up into the Pacific Northwest. (According to Google Maps, it is 813 miles from Rachael's house in Malad to Camilla's house in Everett.)
Monday, July 13
Idaho, Utah
This morning, after Rachael fixed me some breakfast, I left her house about 9:30 and reached Bountiful at 11:00, the same hour I had left Bountiful eleven days earlier to begin the trip.
Friday, December 26, 2008
A merry Christmas from Dixie
It sounds like we made it out of town in just the nick of time, if news reports are to be believed about a major winter storm that slammed most of the state of Utah on Christmas day and evening. We had a nice visit with Chris, Camilla, and Sam inside the airport. They had arrived from Seattle just before 10:15 Christmas morning, and our flight was scheduled to leave at 12:45. They had not expected to get out of Seattle, whose airport had been closed a couple times earlier in the week, because it was snowing heavily in Everett as they left home. As they headed south the snow turned to rain and, by the time they reached the airport, the rain had stopped altogether.
Mom and I flew out of Salt Lake International at a little after 1:00 Christmas afternoon and made good time to Chicago's Midway Airport before immediately boarding our second flight from there to Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions in Chicago had been terrible both before and after Christmas Day, so our window of opportunity was particularly narrow and fortunate. We then drove a rental car from Birmingham the 165 miles to Paul and Eliza's place in Duluth, Georgia, where we greeted them and saw our new little grandson for the first time. We encountered a little rain, but our trip east on I-20 and then northeast on I-85 was without incident, precisely what you want a road trip to be.
Season's greetings from the land of Dixie.
Mom and I flew out of Salt Lake International at a little after 1:00 Christmas afternoon and made good time to Chicago's Midway Airport before immediately boarding our second flight from there to Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions in Chicago had been terrible both before and after Christmas Day, so our window of opportunity was particularly narrow and fortunate. We then drove a rental car from Birmingham the 165 miles to Paul and Eliza's place in Duluth, Georgia, where we greeted them and saw our new little grandson for the first time. We encountered a little rain, but our trip east on I-20 and then northeast on I-85 was without incident, precisely what you want a road trip to be.
Season's greetings from the land of Dixie.
Monday, October 06, 2008
A quick trip to Washington
Friday evening, October 3, Claudia and I flew from Salt Lake to Seattle. Becca had kindly driven Mom to the airport. (I had driven to work and went to the airport straight from there and parked our pickup in long-term parking, since our return would be near midnight on Sunday, and it didn't seem right to ask anyone to come get us at such an hour.)
Our flight was uneventful, which is precisely what you want when you're in an airplane.
It was raining when we landed in Seattle, apparently the first time it had done so in quite a while. The freeway traffic was heavier and slower than Camilla had expected, so we had to wait 20 or more minutes for her and Sam to pick us up. We were happy to see them again, and we drove from the airport (which is south of Seattle) to their home in Everett (which is north of Seattle), listening over and over and over to Sam's favorite song about a happy elephant.
Sam, who is now two, seems so much more grown up and talks a lot, although not always in the same intelligible English we are used to. He is a happy little boy. And was very excited to see his grandma and grandpa.
Chris had finished Camilla's shift at their Great Harvest bakery so she could come get us, but he was home by the time we reached their apartment in Everett. We visited and ate and went to bed.
Chris worked early Saturday morning. Camilla fixed us breakfast. We called to wish Peter a happy second birthday. He was having a great day. Then, before the morning session of conference began, we walked over to the bakery so Mom could be taken on the grand tour. (Although it rained much of the day, it was not raining when we walked over to see the bakery.) We returned to their apartment and somewhat listened to the first half of the morning session of conference, but the Internet connection kept dropping, so we went to their stake center to listen to the final hour of the opening session.
We got sandwiches from the bakery for lunch. Chris stayed with Sam while he took his nap, and Camilla, Mom, and I went to the stake center again to watch the afternoon session. Their stake center, far closer to the apartment than the building where their ward meets, is just on the other side of I-5, so it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes (depending on how you hit the lights) to get there.
Reference was made in the afternoon session to five new temples announced in the morning session. We had not heard the announcement, so we called Michael (actually we called Eliza first, but she didn't answer her phone) to find out where they were. He told us they were in Calgary, Cordoba (Argentina), somewhere in the Kansas City area, Philadelphia, and Rome (Italy).
Chris and I went to the priesthood session together. Afterward I took everyone out to dinner. Originally we were going to try the Olive Garden, but the 45-minute anticipated wait seemed too long, so we went to Red Robin instead. Their wait was only supposed to be 5 or 10 minutes, but actually it was much longer. And then it seemed to take a long time for our food to come after we had ordered it, and Chris's and Camilla's burgers were actually cold, and they complained about that, so the waiter took theirs back and brought hot ones the second time, and then the manager came out to apologize, and Chris told him he was the owner of the Great Harvest next door, and the manager said he'd never been over there but meant to, and they invited him to come, and he didn't charge us at all for their two meals, and it was all so wonderful.
We tried calling Margaret for her first birthday, not that she would really have known we were calling, but Rachael did not answer her phone. So we hope little Margaret had a wonderful day. Vince and Mary had gone up to help them all celebrate.
Sunday morning we participated in the Taylor family tradition of having breakfast burritos for the Sunday morning of general conference. Then we listened to the morning session streaming over the computer. It worked fine for the morning session, but it deteriorated again for the afternoon session and, though we talked about going to the stake center again, we just toughed it out at home and heard much but not all of the session.
Sam was still taking his afternoon nap, so Camilla took Mom and me on a little driving tour of the Everett and Mukilteo area. Chris and Camilla fixed us a delicious dinner that consisted of Parmesan chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, and fruit. And cookie dough ice cream for dessert. Yummy. Then around 6:30 we all left for the airport. It was raining some, but the traffic was good, and we got to the airport a little earlier than we actually needed to. And then our plane left about a half hour later than its scheduled 8:30 departure. They must have flown faster than they would have otherwise, because we landed in Salt Lake pretty close to our scheduled 11:25 arrival. We were home by about midnight.
It had been a delightful weekend. We appreciated visiting with Chris, Camilla, and Sam. We were grateful for the spiritual uplift from general conference. And, as always, it all went by so quickly.
Our flight was uneventful, which is precisely what you want when you're in an airplane.
It was raining when we landed in Seattle, apparently the first time it had done so in quite a while. The freeway traffic was heavier and slower than Camilla had expected, so we had to wait 20 or more minutes for her and Sam to pick us up. We were happy to see them again, and we drove from the airport (which is south of Seattle) to their home in Everett (which is north of Seattle), listening over and over and over to Sam's favorite song about a happy elephant.
Sam, who is now two, seems so much more grown up and talks a lot, although not always in the same intelligible English we are used to. He is a happy little boy. And was very excited to see his grandma and grandpa.
Chris had finished Camilla's shift at their Great Harvest bakery so she could come get us, but he was home by the time we reached their apartment in Everett. We visited and ate and went to bed.
Chris worked early Saturday morning. Camilla fixed us breakfast. We called to wish Peter a happy second birthday. He was having a great day. Then, before the morning session of conference began, we walked over to the bakery so Mom could be taken on the grand tour. (Although it rained much of the day, it was not raining when we walked over to see the bakery.) We returned to their apartment and somewhat listened to the first half of the morning session of conference, but the Internet connection kept dropping, so we went to their stake center to listen to the final hour of the opening session.
We got sandwiches from the bakery for lunch. Chris stayed with Sam while he took his nap, and Camilla, Mom, and I went to the stake center again to watch the afternoon session. Their stake center, far closer to the apartment than the building where their ward meets, is just on the other side of I-5, so it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes (depending on how you hit the lights) to get there.
Reference was made in the afternoon session to five new temples announced in the morning session. We had not heard the announcement, so we called Michael (actually we called Eliza first, but she didn't answer her phone) to find out where they were. He told us they were in Calgary, Cordoba (Argentina), somewhere in the Kansas City area, Philadelphia, and Rome (Italy).
Chris and I went to the priesthood session together. Afterward I took everyone out to dinner. Originally we were going to try the Olive Garden, but the 45-minute anticipated wait seemed too long, so we went to Red Robin instead. Their wait was only supposed to be 5 or 10 minutes, but actually it was much longer. And then it seemed to take a long time for our food to come after we had ordered it, and Chris's and Camilla's burgers were actually cold, and they complained about that, so the waiter took theirs back and brought hot ones the second time, and then the manager came out to apologize, and Chris told him he was the owner of the Great Harvest next door, and the manager said he'd never been over there but meant to, and they invited him to come, and he didn't charge us at all for their two meals, and it was all so wonderful.
We tried calling Margaret for her first birthday, not that she would really have known we were calling, but Rachael did not answer her phone. So we hope little Margaret had a wonderful day. Vince and Mary had gone up to help them all celebrate.
Sunday morning we participated in the Taylor family tradition of having breakfast burritos for the Sunday morning of general conference. Then we listened to the morning session streaming over the computer. It worked fine for the morning session, but it deteriorated again for the afternoon session and, though we talked about going to the stake center again, we just toughed it out at home and heard much but not all of the session.
Sam was still taking his afternoon nap, so Camilla took Mom and me on a little driving tour of the Everett and Mukilteo area. Chris and Camilla fixed us a delicious dinner that consisted of Parmesan chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, and fruit. And cookie dough ice cream for dessert. Yummy. Then around 6:30 we all left for the airport. It was raining some, but the traffic was good, and we got to the airport a little earlier than we actually needed to. And then our plane left about a half hour later than its scheduled 8:30 departure. They must have flown faster than they would have otherwise, because we landed in Salt Lake pretty close to our scheduled 11:25 arrival. We were home by about midnight.
It had been a delightful weekend. We appreciated visiting with Chris, Camilla, and Sam. We were grateful for the spiritual uplift from general conference. And, as always, it all went by so quickly.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Visit to Georgia (the final day)
Thursday was our last full day in the Atlanta area, and it turned into a long, full day. Before Claudia and I left the Kieffers' house this morning, we said good-bye to Kathryn and her mother in anticipation of not seeing them before the day was over. We gave Momma Lue a copy of Mormon's Book as a sort of thank-you gift for all the Kieffers' many kindnesses to us during this week we have been in Georgia.
In the afternoon we left for Mercer University to attend the White Coat Ceremony in which Paul, along with the 146 other entering students, officially became a pharmacy student and began his graduate school career. There were six of us (Claudia and I, Paul's dad and sister, and Eliza and Peter) there cheering him on. We are all so proud of Paul and wish him every best wish as he begins the four-year journey toward his doctor of pharmacy degree. The campus of his school is very beautiful.
We returned to Paul and Eliza's apartment, changed from our Sunday dress, and ate a delicious pot roast and carrots that Eliza had been cooking since morning in the crock pot.
Then all of us except Claudia (who spent a quiet evening alone working on her gospel doctrine lesson for Sunday) drove to Doraville, caught the Marta train (we think that stands for Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) to downtown Atlanta, and got off at the Five Points station. From there we walked through Underground Atlanta and caught a Marta shuttle bus to Turner Field to attend the game between the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs. Ken Kieffer had arranged tickets for us through some acquaintance at work, and they were wonderful tickets, in the center of the lower section just behind the pitcher. We had a great time. And Peter loved the experience and, at times, was proving very entertaining to people sitting all around us and again on the train ride home. The final score, by the way, was Braves 7 Cubs 11.
We got back home a little before midnight. It was after one in the morning by the time Claudia and I said our good-byes, filled Kathryn's car with gas, and returned to the Kieffers' house. We just slept in our clothes since we had to leave for the airport at four in the morning to catch our six o'clock flight home. We flew on United from Atlanta to Chicago and, after a nearly three-hour layover, from Chicago to Salt Lake City. Our final flight left Chicago about fifteen minutes early and arrived in Salt Lake more than half an hour early.
Camilla and Sam picked us up at the airport. They and Chris arrived late Thursday night from Seattle to attend Chris's sister's wedding Friday afternoon here in the Bountiful Temple. They will be here until Monday.
In the afternoon we left for Mercer University to attend the White Coat Ceremony in which Paul, along with the 146 other entering students, officially became a pharmacy student and began his graduate school career. There were six of us (Claudia and I, Paul's dad and sister, and Eliza and Peter) there cheering him on. We are all so proud of Paul and wish him every best wish as he begins the four-year journey toward his doctor of pharmacy degree. The campus of his school is very beautiful.
We returned to Paul and Eliza's apartment, changed from our Sunday dress, and ate a delicious pot roast and carrots that Eliza had been cooking since morning in the crock pot.
Then all of us except Claudia (who spent a quiet evening alone working on her gospel doctrine lesson for Sunday) drove to Doraville, caught the Marta train (we think that stands for Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) to downtown Atlanta, and got off at the Five Points station. From there we walked through Underground Atlanta and caught a Marta shuttle bus to Turner Field to attend the game between the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs. Ken Kieffer had arranged tickets for us through some acquaintance at work, and they were wonderful tickets, in the center of the lower section just behind the pitcher. We had a great time. And Peter loved the experience and, at times, was proving very entertaining to people sitting all around us and again on the train ride home. The final score, by the way, was Braves 7 Cubs 11.
We got back home a little before midnight. It was after one in the morning by the time Claudia and I said our good-byes, filled Kathryn's car with gas, and returned to the Kieffers' house. We just slept in our clothes since we had to leave for the airport at four in the morning to catch our six o'clock flight home. We flew on United from Atlanta to Chicago and, after a nearly three-hour layover, from Chicago to Salt Lake City. Our final flight left Chicago about fifteen minutes early and arrived in Salt Lake more than half an hour early.
Camilla and Sam picked us up at the airport. They and Chris arrived late Thursday night from Seattle to attend Chris's sister's wedding Friday afternoon here in the Bountiful Temple. They will be here until Monday.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Visit to Georgia (continued yet again)
We spent the entire morning Wednesday at the Kieffers' house: Claudia working on her gospel doctrine lesson for Sunday School this coming Sunday, me checking stuff on the Internet, posting an account of our trip, dealing with work-related e-mails, ordering a birthday gift for Michael, etc. We visited with Mama Lue, who was in and out. Eliza had called and said she and Paul had to run a number of errands and were taking Peter with them, so we waited until after they returned.
We drove over to Paul and Eliza's apartment and ate some lunch. We had planned to go this evening to see the laser show at Stone Mountain, but Paul discovered that as of last weekend they discontinued nightly shows and only do it on weekends now that school has resumed. We considered other options and in the end, after Peter awoke from his nap, decided to go find where the temple is located. We spent some time walking around the temple grounds. We arrived probably not long after Kathryn left work. She works in the Distribution Center just behind the temple.
We returned home, fixed the hoagie sandwiches that were originally intended as our picnic supper at Stone Mountain, watched more of the Olympics, and played a board game. It was late when we finished, after ten o'clock, and drove back to Kieffers' to sleep.
We drove over to Paul and Eliza's apartment and ate some lunch. We had planned to go this evening to see the laser show at Stone Mountain, but Paul discovered that as of last weekend they discontinued nightly shows and only do it on weekends now that school has resumed. We considered other options and in the end, after Peter awoke from his nap, decided to go find where the temple is located. We spent some time walking around the temple grounds. We arrived probably not long after Kathryn left work. She works in the Distribution Center just behind the temple.
We returned home, fixed the hoagie sandwiches that were originally intended as our picnic supper at Stone Mountain, watched more of the Olympics, and played a board game. It was late when we finished, after ten o'clock, and drove back to Kieffers' to sleep.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Visit to Georgia (continued)
Monday came and went and still no Paul Sr. or Ashley. They were stranded still in southern California. Fortunately, they caught a nine-thirty Monday night flight (12:30 a.m. Atlanta time) and arrived here in Atlanta at about five o'clock Tuesday morning. They were very tired of having waited in airports since Sunday morning.
On Monday, after Claudia and I were up and ready for the day, we drove over to Paul and Eliza's apartment and spent the rest of the day with them. Their washing machine had apparently been damaged in the move from Utah, but Eliza did not discover that little fact until after a load of clothes had filled up with water and would not then agitate. Not good. So Paul took the machine apart and discovered that one of the springs that holds up the whole interior part of the washing machine had come off. We spent a good part of the next few hours trying to lift and reconnect it. Finally our endurance gave out and we went out to eat at a nearby Waffle House. Adeaquate to refuel us. Nothing to write home about.
We then returned and finished working on the washer, which we finally repaired, put back together, and tried to resume washing the load of clothes. Nothing happened. Some other problem keeps it from working. So we reassembled the crib in Peter's room instead.
Originally we had planned to go to a laser light show at Stone Mountain for our family home evening, but since Paul's dad and sister were not yet here we decided to postpone that and watched more of the Beijing Olympics instead. Claudia and I then drove back to Kieffers' house. We visited a little while with Kathryn and then went to bed.
On Tuesday, after Claudia and I were up for the day, we drove back over to Paul and Eliza's place (15 miles from where the Kieffers live as I clocked it on the odometer of Kathryn's car that we are using for the week). We had visited a little with Kathryn after her seminary class (which she teaches each school day from six to seven in the morning) and before she left before eight for work at the Distribution Center near the Atlanta Temple. School started here yesterday, and the first day of seminary was this morning.
We helped watch Peter while Paul and Eliza went to their ten-thirty appointment to get Georgia driver licenses and register to vote. By now Paul's dad and sister were here, recovering still from their having flown through the night and having endured waiting at airports since Sunday morning. We watched more of the televised coverage of the Olympics.
In the afternoon we all went shopping at Wal-Mart to help fill up Paul and Eliza's pantry and refrigerator. We filled three shopping carts. As our little way of helping the kids get a start here in their new home, Paul Sr. paid for what was in his cart, Claudia and I paid for what was in our cart, and Paul and Eliza paid for what was in their cart. We brought everything home, put it away, fixed a late lunch, and Claudia and I took Eliza to Sam's Club to get the few more things that were still needed.
Originally we had planned to go to a laser light show at Stone Mountain, but it started raining, so that plan was postponed once again. Apparently the rain is good, since the whole region here is in a prolonged drought.
After watching more of the Olympics, Paul and Eliza generously took us all to dinner at Tanner's, a restaurant in Suwanee, not far from Kieffers' house, for a late dinner. We got there at eight o'clock, and the restaurant closed at nine. We went there to try the fried pickles that Eliza (and Peter) love so much. They were good, as was the rest of the food we all had. The portions were huge, and we thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. Claudia had chicken and ribs with mashed potatoes and gravy and apples and cinnamon as her two sides. I had chicken with apples served on a bed of rice with baked beans and grilled corn on the cob as sides. It was all very delicious.
We then went to Kieffers' house. Paul and Eliza came too, so they could introduce Paul Sr. and Ashley to the Kieffers and check on the tickets to the Atlanta Braves games on Thursday night that Ken can get through someone he knows at work and so Peter could play with Mattie (the Kieffers' dog). Mama Lue was back from her visit to Kansas City, and we all had a delightful visit. The Kieffers, who we consider practically as family, are so incredibly nice and helpful and generous.
On Monday, after Claudia and I were up and ready for the day, we drove over to Paul and Eliza's apartment and spent the rest of the day with them. Their washing machine had apparently been damaged in the move from Utah, but Eliza did not discover that little fact until after a load of clothes had filled up with water and would not then agitate. Not good. So Paul took the machine apart and discovered that one of the springs that holds up the whole interior part of the washing machine had come off. We spent a good part of the next few hours trying to lift and reconnect it. Finally our endurance gave out and we went out to eat at a nearby Waffle House. Adeaquate to refuel us. Nothing to write home about.
We then returned and finished working on the washer, which we finally repaired, put back together, and tried to resume washing the load of clothes. Nothing happened. Some other problem keeps it from working. So we reassembled the crib in Peter's room instead.
Originally we had planned to go to a laser light show at Stone Mountain for our family home evening, but since Paul's dad and sister were not yet here we decided to postpone that and watched more of the Beijing Olympics instead. Claudia and I then drove back to Kieffers' house. We visited a little while with Kathryn and then went to bed.
On Tuesday, after Claudia and I were up for the day, we drove back over to Paul and Eliza's place (15 miles from where the Kieffers live as I clocked it on the odometer of Kathryn's car that we are using for the week). We had visited a little with Kathryn after her seminary class (which she teaches each school day from six to seven in the morning) and before she left before eight for work at the Distribution Center near the Atlanta Temple. School started here yesterday, and the first day of seminary was this morning.
We helped watch Peter while Paul and Eliza went to their ten-thirty appointment to get Georgia driver licenses and register to vote. By now Paul's dad and sister were here, recovering still from their having flown through the night and having endured waiting at airports since Sunday morning. We watched more of the televised coverage of the Olympics.
In the afternoon we all went shopping at Wal-Mart to help fill up Paul and Eliza's pantry and refrigerator. We filled three shopping carts. As our little way of helping the kids get a start here in their new home, Paul Sr. paid for what was in his cart, Claudia and I paid for what was in our cart, and Paul and Eliza paid for what was in their cart. We brought everything home, put it away, fixed a late lunch, and Claudia and I took Eliza to Sam's Club to get the few more things that were still needed.
Originally we had planned to go to a laser light show at Stone Mountain, but it started raining, so that plan was postponed once again. Apparently the rain is good, since the whole region here is in a prolonged drought.
After watching more of the Olympics, Paul and Eliza generously took us all to dinner at Tanner's, a restaurant in Suwanee, not far from Kieffers' house, for a late dinner. We got there at eight o'clock, and the restaurant closed at nine. We went there to try the fried pickles that Eliza (and Peter) love so much. They were good, as was the rest of the food we all had. The portions were huge, and we thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. Claudia had chicken and ribs with mashed potatoes and gravy and apples and cinnamon as her two sides. I had chicken with apples served on a bed of rice with baked beans and grilled corn on the cob as sides. It was all very delicious.
We then went to Kieffers' house. Paul and Eliza came too, so they could introduce Paul Sr. and Ashley to the Kieffers and check on the tickets to the Atlanta Braves games on Thursday night that Ken can get through someone he knows at work and so Peter could play with Mattie (the Kieffers' dog). Mama Lue was back from her visit to Kansas City, and we all had a delightful visit. The Kieffers, who we consider practically as family, are so incredibly nice and helpful and generous.
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