Summer in Utah

So I finally made it through all the photos from our trip to Utah this summer. It was a great trip...the kids are still talking about it daily.

We started with the standard overnight flight to Salt Lake. There is a direct flight from Fairbanks in the summer which is nice, but there is nothing easy about flying all night. The kids did pretty well and we all managed to be semi functional on the day we arrived. Cousins were there in force from day one which was nice. The kids really love their cousins and can't seem to get enough of them. We had them from both sides of the family...kind of a cousin paradise. We also had the grandparent infusion which we really miss being so far away. We have such a great family!

Anyway, I guess I'll just start at the beginning...

We had been to the Children's Museum before and the kids really love it. They got addicted to children's museums in general when we lived in Ohio and went to COSI (great museum in Columbus). The Salt Lake version has an actual helicopter for kids to climb in, a great arts/crafts area and they're developing an area where you can basically make your own production videos. Owen and his cousin Jacob climbed all over the helicopter for well over an hour before I dragged them off to some other play area. The other cousins made their own slide, various art projects and sculptures. There was also an air powered ball contraption that was popular with all the kiddos.

Just next door to the Children's Museum is the Planetarium. I remember going to the old Hansen Planetarium downtown and watching the giant pendulum swing (shows the rotation of the earth). The pendulum is in the new Planetarium as well along with some other great displays including an area where you can walk on a simulated moon and Mars. There is also a weather broadcast station, an IMAX theater and models of all the planets. They also have the largest elevator I have ever seen. Owen and Jacob spent about a half hour staring at a very intracate ball contraption that is basically like a Rube Golberg Machine. It is multilevel and pretty neat-o.

Both the Children's Museum and the Planetarium are in Gateway which is an "off-downtown" development. It's a great place to go for indoor stuff but they also have a great fountain that we went to later in the week. We were there with cousins and the combination of water and music is tough to beat. The water is there at a pretty good display level for most of the day and then every once in a while, they juice it up a little and blast high energy music. All the kids in the whole area immediately look like they've all been attacked by bees and start jumping and running around. My kids were no exception.

Gram had some great dinners and get together's with the Cooks throughout our weeks there. They've started a great tradition of discussing some gospel topic each month as an extended family. I've always wanted to go and so we had one while we were there. Carol actually led the discussion and it was great to see and be a part of. It was also really nice to get to spend some time with Carol's family. I really don't get to see them as much as I'd like and I got to do that a bit more this time as I had a few extra days in Utah. It still wasn't enough time, but I'll take what I can get. Carol's sister just had twins this year and they have become such beautiful girls (not that they weren't beautiful before). The cousins of course had a great time being together as well.

Carol and I really love being able to see family when we come to Utah, but we also get to see some of our long lost friends. This trip we got to hang out with some of our Ohio friends as well as some old high school friends. Ohio night out was at a little place by the river near Sugarhouse Park (I forgot the name). The food was good, but mostly it's nice just to talk with old friends. The high school night was a little dinner and marshmallow roast up Millcreek canyon. I'll write about that in another post, but it was great to see everyone. Our kids also enjoy all the new playmates they meet as we drag them from family to family. They also love seeing their old playmates and somehow seem to pick up right where they left off even though they haven't seen each other in a long time.

One of the favorite days had to have been our trip up to Eden. No, it's not that Eden, but it really is a beautiful spot. My uncle lives in Eden, UT which is a small farming town by Pineview Reservoir. The surrounding mountains are absolutely beautiful and the lake is right there for additional recreation. He has a small fishing pond fed by a natural spring stocked with little swimmers and some very patient horses for riding (Tennessee Trotters I think). My cousin Rich helped with the fishing and then my uncle taught us all how to clean a fish. Eliza (cousin number one on the Hammond side) took after the fish cleaning with reckless abandon. Beth jumped in there and cleaned away as well, but wasn't quite as excited about the whole thing. Horse riding was a hit for everyone and even the little kids got to ride. My sister, sister-in-law, father and Carol all jumped on as well.

After Eden, we decided to try out the new Frontrunner train that just started service from Salt Lake to Brigham City. It stops in Ogden by the train museum and having lots of train fans, it seemed like a perfect spot. The ride up was great and really quite quick. Ticketing is pretty much automated and the stations are clean and pretty well laid out. The train museum in Ogden is fantastic. There are a bunch of retired trains to climb on and the kids can all go crazy pulling on the levers and whistles. The museum gives a good history of the trans- continental railroad which of course was completed at the golden spike near Ogden. There is also a car museum there which has some amazing old cars in tip top shape. We were up there for a couple of hours but there was still a lot we didn't see. We'll have to make another trip back soon.

One thing we always try to do anytime we're in Salt Lake is make it up one of the canyons. Carol's grandparents have a cabin up by Kamas and my grandparents have one up Big Cottonwood Canyon. The kids love going up for a change of scenery and the adults love it as it's about 15-20 degrees cooler up there and it's a great way to get out of the Utah heat. The kids went up to both cabins while they were in Utah, but I only made it up Big Cottonwood. We went up there and hiked around Silver Lake which still has a lot of leftover snow from the good dumping Utah got over the winter. Snow and warm weather always makes for a great snowball fight and shoe skiing (glissading?). We also played a bunch on the swings, went hiking around, threw rocks in the stream, etc. The river was a little high this year which prompted memories I have of my grandmother telling me about all the championship swimmers that had died after falling in the river and how careful I should be. I now see the reason for the story as I have to admit I get quite a bit of anxiety when my kids get next to fast moving water. I think my dad my not have had this fear as I remember him taking my rock jumping in the same stream in which the aforementioned swimmers had perished. I somehow survived, however and I can only hope my kids are as fortunate to make it through childhood and adolescence with similar statistics.

Our final adventure for my portion of the Utah trip was an excursion out to Thanksgiving Point. I had played golf out there before (great course...definitely in my top 3 for Utah) but hadn't really seen much else. All I can say is that it's a GREAT place for kids. We first went to the gardens that boasts the largest man made waterfall. The waterfall is pretty nice, but the gardens are amazing. Acre after acre of flowers and fountains...it's like you died and went to France. Everything really was beautiful and there's lots of space for the kids to run around. The better kid attraction, however had to be the adjacent play area. It opens with a scaled down replica of Noah's Ark complete with bronzed animals and multiple fountains. The kids got soaked and loved playing around in the water (who wouldn't at 100F). After the fountains, we explored a maze, a cave and some play houses. There are more bronzed animals hidden throughout the park that the kids loved finding and climbing on. Apparently there's also a dinosaur park which we never made it to. This is another place (like the train museum) that we'll definitely have to come back to.

Our final day was spend with Maama and Popop in a birthday/baptism celebration for Hannah who was soon to be 8. We had a big dinner and the kids actually put together a whole production including dancing and singing. They even made custom programs to hand out! They really did a good job and Beth and Isabel still sing the song they learned for it. We all enjoy ed fresh strawberry pie with lots of whipped cream and said our good byes. The time went by fast and it will be great to see everyone again so on. The kids still talk about all their cousins every few days and they really can't wait to get back. It's so wonderful to have the incredible family that we do. It really is an amazing blessing to us and our kids. I'll see if I can get Carol to post something about her adventures after I left (that's when the REAL party started).

See you all soon!

As far as photos go, I'll just say I took a lot. I separated them on our photo site by location and then I made a "best of" for those of you who don't want to go through 700 photos. I'll put links to both below.

Link to all photos categorized is here.
Link to "Best of SLC" is here.

Olympics

I got sucked up by the Olympics. I actually have a ton of stuff to post, but I started looking at the opening ceremonies a couple of weeks ago, and my nights were gone until last Sunday. There really is something magical about the Olympics. It's amazing to watch all these sports I never see and hear all the personal stories of the competitors. I was also very impressed with the architecture and production of the games by China. Certainly the games were not without controversy (child labor anyone?) but still I was very impressed overall.

I probably watched more coverage this Olympics than any other year in the past including the Salt Lake games in '02. I watched all the traditional sports like gymnastics, volleyball, swimming and track, but I also got a good look at badminton, table tennis and water polo. I didn't do much with the basketball. I watched a few quarters, but Olympic basketball never seems to match up to the other competition from a drama standpoint (in my opinion). The swimming was amazing and the gymnastics always seems superhuman to me. I also loved the Jamaican runner stories (Bolt et. al.). The sporting tragedies are also there and painful to watch, but part of the experience. The baton dropping for the men and women in the 4x100m was hard to see as well as the women's 110m hurdles (favored US woman clipped second to last hurdle). Phelps was the obvious story of the games and will be a great memory for years to come.

I must say that for those of you who do not have a DVR, the investment just for the Olympics alone is well worth it. We got one when we bought our house three years ago (came with it from the previous owners) and I don't know that I could ever go back. I probably do end up watching a little more TV which is bad, but I haven't seen a commercial in 3 years. The Olympics is especially good for this as there is really a lot of down time between events. Some of this is filled with great personal stories, which I usually watch, but there are still a lot of commercials and a lot of preliminary events. My experience this year basically consisted of coming home from work, getting the kids in bed and sitting down to 15 hours of recorded Olympics. I could usually make it through the 15 hours in about 3. I skipped all commercials, all preliminary events (finals only), all pre-final games (would fast forward through first 2-3 volleyball games until I was at a potentially winning game, all non final quarters (watched last quarter of water polo and basketball) and diving (for whatever reason, I just never get into diving...not that the athletes are not amazing, I'm just not cultured enough to appreciate it). It really was 3 hours of sporting nirvana and I got to have it every night for 2 weeks (literally 15 hours EVERY DAY to mow through)...great way to see the games. I am glad they are over as I didn't really get anything done during those two weeks but I'm already looking forward to 2010 and Torino. Feel free to stop by anytime after 8:30 as I'm sure I'll be home and glued to the tube.

Brick o' Fries

The State Fair has arrived. Usually Carol and the kids aren't in town for the Fair, but this year our Utah excursion happened a little earlier so we made it back in time. We did go our first year here and I remember two things...brick o' fries and mediocre expensive rides. Both items were also present this year as well (for better or worse). The Fair here is actually kind of the big event of the year and EVERYONE goes. The parking lot is always full and the fairgrounds always busy. It was a little rainy on the day we went, but not too bad and certainly not anything that could keep the kids away. We started and ended with rides with nutritious fair food and agriculture viewing in between (huge cabbages from the midnight sun up here). Rides are mostly like a mini-Lagoon (for those of you who have been to Lagoon). They have the free fall swing, the magic carpet thing, the upside-down hammer rides and a mini-coaster. They also have kids rides complete with merry-go-round and mini-train. One aspect of the Fair that I didn't remember was the incredibly magnetic games for kids to play (at $5 a pop). They had the ring toss and dart throw (Beth won a stuffed flower there), a duck river thing and a pseudo fishing pond. The kids were much more entranced with the games than the rides. We kind of set limits before entering the Fair which helped, but we still weakened and gave in a little.

The highlight of the Fair for all the kids has to have been the "Brick o' Fries". This is a bunch of freshly cut potatoes packed into a frying basket until it is completely full and then fried and inverted onto a plate. They are actually delicious and the kids all gobbled them up. We did somehow stay away from the funnel cakes, cotton candy and fried candy bars although we may not be so lucky next time. There really is something unique about Fair food. It's definitely not healthy, but tastes oh so good.

From a ride standpoint, I think the ferris wheel was the highlight for Owen. I was never a fan of the ferris wheel and always got the queasies whenever at the top. I must admit I thought Owen would freak out a little once we got to the top and started tipping. I guess my dad, however had taken him a number of times in Utah on the ferris wheel so he was a ferris veteran and ended up loving it so much he likely would have fallen out if not for the good restraints on the rides (kept tipping forward to wave to mom). He also loved the many farm and construction machines local companies had brought in for the kids to climb on. The girls both liked the super slide and Beth, Isabel and Owen all were somewhat traumatized by the kiddie coaster. They actually all enjoyed the first ride around the track but then became confused when it didn't stop at the exit (it was a short track and made 6 laps).

We all had a good time and may be back before the festivities are over (2 weeks). In the mean time, I may have to figure out how to do a brick o' fries at home. Sorry about the photos...they are from a cell phone so I take no responsibility!