Visiting SLC

In the late afternoon the day after Christmas, we set off in our minivan for Salt Lake City to visit my parents. After a lot of events that brought my parents to White Salmon in 2010 (Holly's birth, family reunion, Adah's baptism), it was time for us to head in their direction. The girls hadn't been there for over 18 months and Damon hadn't been since Gunnar was a newborn!

We left with our tire chains on board, just in case, but traveled on clear roads the entire way. We overnighted on the Oregon-Idaho border in Ontario where, after Gunnar's week of feeling lousy, we got the best night's sleep we'd had for over a week. That gave us a bit of a late start, but we were much happier travelers and rolled into my parents' underground condo parking garage in the late afternoon of Monday, December 27.

The next day we headed out on a geocaching adventure at the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Perhaps it sounds like a strange place to find "treasure," but it's the location of the graves of most of the presidents of the LDS Church and the subject of a rather intricate geocache.

I still don't really know how the GPS devices really work or what you do to geocache (I've got Geocaching for Dummies from the library), so I'm not going to explain this very well. I spent most of the time at the cemetery either helping Gunnar calm down (some stone lions kind of freaked him out and he still wasn't feeling 100%) or nursing Holly in the car, so I missed out on much of the action. Essentially, we had a long list of directions that led us from one headstone to another where we had to use clues on each stone to determine the coordinate of the next site. For example, the directions might tell us to use the number of letters in the name of the prophet's birthplace, or the third digit of the year he died, or something like that.

In the end, only Maggie, Damon, and my dad completed the whole course. The rest of us chickened out, mainly due to the cold. We came in two cars anyway, so my mom and I took everyone else back home while the troopers stayed until the end.

Later that evening, we went to Temple Square.

We ate dinner at the Lion House, a former home of Brigham Young, before setting out with hundreds of others to view the holiday lights still on display.

Adah really wanted to see all the floating lights on the reflecting pool. She remembered them from our last visit three years ago...and probably a little bit from the Church's Joy to the World Christmas DVD.

Gunnar wanted to see the "big statue of Jesus," meaning the Christus statue in the North Visitors' Center. He'd seen some pictures of us visiting there about 18 months ago. The kids were really sweet and I sat with them on the floor at Jesus' feet. When I suggested that we go, they all wanted to stay a little longer. Even though there were throngs of people crowding the area, the children could feel the quiet peace that comes when thinking about Christ. I loved being there with them and knowing that my children are beginning to understand the feelings of the Spirit.

The rest of our week was spent shopping--the kiddos had Christmas money burning holes in their pockets, okay maybe I did, too--movie-watching (we all saw Tangled in the theater), and visiting some friends and my brother Pete. Damon and I went out with some of my high school friends one night and the six of us visited some Boston friends one afternoon. My parents earned big points for babysitting twice in the same day so that we could go to the temple in the morning and then out to dinner that night. And, Damon earned big points by taking the 3 big kids into the city to ride Trax, visit the library, and in general have a day on the town while my mom and I (with Holly) had our own shopping day.

In all, it was a great trip and I'm so glad we could go...especially for the New Year's Eve Chinese dumplings the night before we left. We wished we could have been there a little longer, but with the way the holidays fell this year, the girls had to be back in school on January 3. Thanks for a great time, Nana & Gumpin!