Salt Lake City / Provo, Utah

Family brought us up to northern Utah – my cousin Beth and her family moved to Provo a couple years ago from Seattle. We were close and there was an outstanding offer to park in front of their house so there was high interest to visit! Gunner loved the huge fenced backyard – being off the leash is a rare sight on our travels. Having sunny weather in the 70’s made it great too!

Jesse and I have both been to SLC before, but it’s been 10+ years for both of us. It was great to check out downtown, Temple Square and the capital, all very walkable! One of Jesse’s good friends from Grad School happened to also be in town so that was fun to see him again. Temple Square was full of beautiful tulips and other brightly colored flowers – that was my favorite part of the day. We also worked on our family’s genealogy – parts of my family went back to the year 1400!!! We finished the day off listening to the Mormon Tabernacle (MoTab!) Choir practice – wow they sounded great!

We walked up to the state capital, it sits high on a hill overlooking everything, and we were allowed access to just about every part of the building, very much the “people’s capital”.

Beth’s husband Trent works for BYU as an Editor for a popular tv show on BYUTV called Studio C. It’s actually very funny – check it out on Youtube! They live very close to the campus of BYU so we checked out their museum of modern art and it was great! There was an M.C. Escher exhibit and also an exhibit from a hilarious artist that took Flemish style selfies in airplane bathrooms and made a family tree out of people on food packaging among other laugh out loud art. If you ever see art from Dina Katchadourian check it out!

We also took a day trip to nearby Park City, the sight of the 2002 Olympics. It’s a super fun big little ski town with lots of boutiques and cafes. Amazingly I think they just shut down the hill about a week or so ago, and it was 70 degrees when we were there! What’s super cool is that you can actually ski across a big bridge into downtown Park City, and they get on a ski lift to go back up the mountain right there outside a café! Just a bit further from the base of the ski resort, is the Olympic Training facility for bobsled and ski jumping. During the winter and summer, you can actually go down the bobsled course – but unfortunately not in the two shoulder seasons! In the summer you can ski jump into a pool too – now that would be amazing! There was also a great museum with lots of history of downhill skiing, and lots of memorabilia from the 2002 Olympics. It was fun seeing those memories.

Beth’s daughter Kajsa is home on school break from BYU-I, and among many other things, introduced us to Sodalicious. It’s a soda pop shop with tons of different flavors/recipes that our family enjoyed very much! Beth son Dallin introduced us to the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, or just “Ultimate”! He had a tournament that we watched all weekend, it was quite exciting cheering on the fast-paced action – his team did great as well!

We got in a couple of fun board games during our visit, seems we all like trivia and laughing! We’re loving seeing so many of our cousins and extended family on this trip. It’s great to see how everyone has changed and grown – and fun to show the boys off to those who haven’t seen them in forever! (MT)