Summer in the USA 2025

 This post is long over due. Life gets crazy and time gets short, but I had a wonderful time visiting the family for an extended trip that covered part of June, all of July, and part of August! One big event that brought me back to Utah was my "official" move to Vineyard, UT. The house was completed and I moved in!

My two main projects were to get the landscaping put in and get blinds on the windows. I didn't realize that those two tasks would be pretty straight forward. It turned out the trickiest part of the move was getting Vineyard City and the US Post Office to agree what our address would be. It took the entire summer before we finally worked it out and I was able to get the mailbox key!









Aside from "moving to Utah", the main event of the summer was Boone's baptism. It was a wonderful day and everyone had a lovely time - the program and baptism went perfectly and the brunch at the church pavilion was delicious!







Over the next few days we had fun at the Loveland Aquarium and Wheeler Farm.





4th of July in Utah is so iconic! We went to America's Freedom Festival (an Orem tradition) and we did the classic street fireworks. We had some good ones, but the neighbors - they went crazy this year! Later in the evening we went to a park up in the foothills to get a glimpse of the BYU Stadium of Fire - next year maybe we just buy tickets!








In mid-July Bowman and the boys went to Alaska to fish and Steph and the girls and I took a trip to Bear Lake. We did the whole WAKE, LAKE, SHAKE experience! We went to the playhouse and saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, ate a ton of yummy food, including SHAKES, played at the lake, toured Minnetonka Cave, and rented a buggy-bike for a ride around town. We (well, I fell asleep) watched the new hit movie K-Pop Demon Hunters. It was the soundtrack of the summer! 













As we were driving down the winding road from the cave tour, I commented to Steph that we might watch out for moose, literally 2 seconds later we saw a huge moose right in front of us. We were shocked, startled, and bit scared. But it was so cool to see it!


The wildflowers in the canyon around the Alta Ski Resort were in full bloom in July so I convinced Steph and the girls to go on a hike to see them. Steph was a sport about it, even though her knee was still not all the way healed. But Ray and Maya were not fans.  It was beautiful, but maybe you have to be older to appreciate it haha






We also visited the exhibition hall to see a preview of the floats in the 24th of July parade. They were all amazing and some even had props to take pictures with.
 

At the end of July I made a trip to Boise to visit Ben and family. We had so much fun camping, walking along the greenbelt, going to a playland, eating yummy food, and trying out Violet's new paddle board. 















More summer fun -  Maya's swim meets, playing Go Nuts for Donuts, soak in the hot tub, celebrating Steph's bday, lunch to celebrate Rayna's passing the French AP test, acai bowls with the gang, Primary activity days, and Danny getting his patriarchal blessing. What a fun summer!

















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures

Image
  We spent a wonderful 5 days exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures over the Labor Day weekend. We had an early morning flight to Izumo and so we decided the best option was to spend the night in the Hotel Villa Fontaine which is attached to the Haneda Airport. It turned out to be a very convenient way to make the flight that left at 7am. On our way to the airport, we bumped into one of Kimball's co-workers. When he heard where we were headed he told us his wife was from Shimane. He highly recommend we stop at Izumo Taisha, a very old and famous shrine (Top 100, for sure!). So, on his advice we made that our first stop of the day.  It was a lovely place and by visiting we became educated on the story of the rabbit hopping from Oki Island to the mainland on the backs of many hundreds of sharks. Right at the end, the sharks got mad because they thought the rabbit had tricked them. So, they bit off the rabbits fur and left him to suffer in the saltwater and sun. Three brother...
Read more

Kanazawa November 2025

Image
One of the main reasons we applied to extend our stay in Japan until December, is so that we could enjoy one more autumn season.  We had heard that Kenrokuen Garden (one of the Top 3 gardens in Japan) was beautiful in the fall so we decided to make Kanazawa one of our last trips.  Kanazawa is known as the "little Kyoto", but we were surprised to find it is not "little" at all. It's quite a big city. It has a feeling of both modern and old all wrapped in one. We took the Shinkansen from Tokyo (our favorite way to travel in Japan). The Kanazawa train station has some very unique architecture.   At the station we were able to get on a Loop Bus that made stops at many of the sites in the city. Our first stop was Higashi Chaya, a very nicely preserved Edo period district. It is also an area where there are many tea rooms and Geisha working there. We saw a women dressed in Geisha clothing running down one of the side streets - she must have been late to something. (Si...
Read more

Farewell Fujisan

Image
 Back in December of 2020 we went on a trip with MWR where we hiked Mt. Kasturagi. It was a hard hike for several reasons - it was long, it was steep, and it was raining. When we finally got to the top, we were disappointed because the fabulous view of Mt Fuji we were hoping to see was covered in clouds. I always vowed I would go back someday to see that view. We finally made it on our second to last weekend in Japan.  We looked at the weather forecast ahead of time and thought it would be a good day to go, but when we arrive in Numazu the clouds had rolled in and Fuji was no where to be seen. Hoping for better luck later in the day, we stopped to see a unique feat of engineering, the Numazu Port Water Gate. It was built in the early 2000s to help prevent flooding from tsunamis and typhoons. The gate can be dropped and, in conjunction with a seawall, it will stop the water from flowing inland to flood the low lying areas.  Both sides of the gate are open for people to go ...
Read more