Wow! We have had a busy summer! I'm finally finding a minute now to write about our fun month of June.
It started with our 23rd Anniversary. We had celebrated a couple of days before because our actual anniversary was on a Sunday this year. The gift for 23 years is Silver Platting, so Dustin got me a picture frame with pictures of us in it, and I got him a license plate cover. Plus, we finally opened the Iceland photo book that I had finished a couple of months earlier. Now we can look at Iceland any time we want and remember how fun it was!
We went to the Ogden Temple with Dustin's dad and found Grant's street.
Maren's birthday was a few days later. We celebrated a day early because Avery was in town. We had lots of cousins and family come, and it was fun. She is 19! Crazy how time is flying! She finished her first year at BYU in the Spring, and has done such a good job of adulting! She went to school full time and worked part time and also had a lot of fun. She is responsible, smart, fun and funny and we have loved having her home for the summer before she leaves for her mission in a few weeks. We will miss her when she is gone! She brings joy and energy, wherever she goes!
She wanted a homemade raspberry ice cream cake.
The next day was her actual birthday, so we had dinner, played mini golf at Cherry Hill, and then had ice cream at the Kaysville Creamery.
A couple of days later we went to the Losee Reunion up in Oak City with some of my family. It is always fun to get caught up with extended family, ride the 4 wheeler and soak our feet in a freezing creek. Especially when it is SO hot outside!
Since we were already down south, we drove on to Cedar City and spent Father's Day with my parents. I am grateful for such good men in our lives!
Ryan took his first ever Discovery Flight in a small plane with a family friend. He is thinking about becoming a pilot someday, and our friend thought it would be fun for him to go up in the plane and see how it feels. He absolutely loved it!
Maren and I visited Avery and went shopping with her a couple of days before her birthday. While we were there, her roommates surprised her with a little birthday brownie. We were leaving the next day for our vacation and her actual birthday would be while we were gone. Such nice roommates!
We started our trip to Seattle to see Avery's mission on a Thursday night. We stopped in Boise to swim and sleep and got up early the next morning to continue our journey, with only a couple of stops for food and to throw a frisbee at a rest area (which is why Ryan is on top of the pavilion...)
We made it to Seattle just in time for our appointment at the temple to do Baptisms for the Dead. The grounds around the temple are so beautiful! I have always loved Seattle. It is so green! We went to dinner afterward at a restaurant where Avery says everyone goes to eat after the temple. And it did seem like it! We saw multiple people dressed up in church clothes. We were staying with Chad and Val that night, so on our way up to their house, we drove around some of Avery's areas where she had lived. We also walked around Juanita Bay and stopped at a church where she served. That night we made it to Chad and Val's to stay for a few days.
Saturday morning we got up and went on a 7 mile hike near Chad's house. It was gorgeous! We ate wild gooseberries all along the way, and it ended in a fun waterfall, which always makes it worth it for my family. The kids (and us old people) did great with the hike!
We drove on to Leavenworth for dinner and also because we had never been there. It is a cute, Bavarian style town in the mountains of Washington. It was fun to eat and walk around and feel like we were in Germany or Switzerland.
It was Avery's birthday that day, so we stopped at a grocery store and bought her a cake for the next day (we were doing cake on Sunday, since some of Chad and Val's kids were coming for dinner.). We did have her open her presents that night so that it felt a little bit more like her birthday.
The next day was Sunday. We went to church with Chad and Val and then came home and had a fun dinner and cake for Avery's birthday. Khalina and Edgar and Khalina's boys came over, plus Val's son, Malachi. We had fun playing cornhole, exploring their huge yard and playing games later that night.
I can't believe we have a 21 year old! Avery has grown up so much in the last couple of years and it was so amazing to see her in Seattle, in her element. She had so much love for the people there and confidence in herself. She knew the city and guided us around like a pro and she was so happy to see her friends again. It was really neat for us to see. Back at home, Avery is living down in Provo, attended BYU in Spring Term and is working in the Finance Major Department. She's having fun reconnecting with her former mission companions and friends. She is doing great things!
We spent the next day touring around other places where Avery had lived and taught, and found some of her favorite people and places when she had lived there. We also saw the Locks and went to Pike's Place in downtown Seattle. We even ran into old friends from Utah!
Avery took us to meet a sweet friend she had been teaching, right before she left to come home. It was fun to hear Avery bust out her Spanish like a pro! Then we met up with her former companions on their P-Day, at the church nearby and she visited with them for a minute, while we entertained ourselves in the church.
Avery took us to a fun place to eat dinner, with the airplanes flying directly overhead. And then we went to see where she had lived in that area. She also took us to Alki, with great views of the city across the harbor. So fun to imagine her in all of these places when she lived here! And many of them we recognized from her pictures!
The next morning we said goodbye to Chad and Val and drove north to Vancouver, Canada! We have been to Seattle a number of times, but never to Canada, so we thought we'd take the kids this year and see something new. It was a little awkward getting into Canada. We pulled up wrong and got chastised by the border agent, which mortified our kids. Then we accidentally pulled into the wrong spot at the Peace Arch and had to exit the country and come back through the border. Hahaha! Our kids were about to die of embarrassment! When we got into Canada, we used Dustin's phone to navigate, and quickly got a message that he had just wracked up $1,000 worth of out-of-country charges. Whoops! So we spent the next several minutes, parked in a neighborhood, trying to get that all straightened out with Dustin's work (which we did). The phones were not working great throughout our time there, which was frustrating at times, but luckily, usually at least one of us had a phone that worked, so we didn't get completely lost! I forget how much we rely on phones for our navigation!
Once we got through our couple of hiccups, we went into downtown Vancouver and walked around China Town. We had read some reviews online that China Town was a little sketchy, with lots of homeless people and drug use going on. We figured they were exaggerated... but, as we got a block or two away from the main area, we came upon a super sad scene of probably a hundred people laying around all over the sidewalks and shuffling along, without even seeming to recognize we were there. One of the reviews described the people as zombies, and that's kind of how it felt. It was so so sad and we quickly got out of that area! So sad to know that these are God's children! And He loves them, too! (We obviously didn't take any pictures of this, but I don't think I'll ever forget how sad it was!). Once we got out of that area, we found the busy, happy tourist area. So sad that just a few blocks away were so many people with hard hard lives!
An old steam clock
We were all feeling a little yucky after that, but we drove to our next stop, Granville Island, and had a lot of fun wandering the markets and shopping for fun treats and different foods.
We moved on next to our Airbnb. We got settled in there and then drove to Queen Elizabeth Park and wandered around until the sun went down. Then we headed back to our house and made dinner from the fun pasta and raviolis that we had bought at the market in Granville Island. We also stopped at a grocery store and bought up all the new kinds of candy bars we could find for our dessert later.
The next morning we rented bikes and biked all around Stanley Island, near Vancouver. There is a great path all around the seawall of the island and it was so fun to bike it and see lots of fun things along the way. We even found a trail and parked our bikes and walked to a little lake. It was a really beautiful area!
We got back to a parking ticket (super annoying, because I had paid to park, but had put the wrong lot number in). We had a goal to not eat at any fast food restaurant that we would have in the U.S., but it proved to be difficult this day and we ended up finding a McDonalds, but it did have a few different menu items, like shakeable seasoned fries and cookies. That's how we justified it! We did keep looking for something unique to eat, and we ended up getting food from multiple restaurants in the area to satisfy everyone, so we did try a few new things.
Our next stop was Lighthouse Park, near North Vancouver. The hike down to the Lighthouse was rainy and chilly, but probably one of the most beautiful hikes we've ever been on! The huge trees! The green everything! It was amazing. Even with Maren having blisters and deciding to walk barefoot, Ryan slipping on the rocks and cutting his hand, and all of us being a little cold and wet, it was a really fun afternoon.
The girls and boys separated for the route back to the car and we each took different trails so we could see more. They both looked about the same in the end!
We hurried (actually, crawled, through nasty rush hour traffic) back to our house and got changed and raced to make it to the temple on time for our Baptism for the Dead appointment. It was so peaceful and beautiful. We ran into the Vancouver mission president and his wife as we came out of the temple and they were so nice. Maren has a friend who will serve in their mission in a few months, so we took a picture with them and sent it to her friend. I love that wherever we go, we run into members of our church and feel like we are instant friends! We luckily found a place to eat that was open late and we had a delicious dinner and went home exhausted and went to bed.
We got up the next morning and took a ferry to Victoria, B.C. Our first stop was the Butchart Gardens. This has been on Dustin's bucket list for many years and it did not disappoint! It was so beautiful!
The China Garden and the Rose Garden were our favorites. And we had yummy gelato at the Italian Garden. The Rose Garden was the only garden that had the plants labeled and it was so fun to see the names and dates of each variety of rose. The kids were champs, and let us take our time and really see the beautiful gardens.
That afternoon we went to China Town in Victoria, which is one of the oldest in North America. We loved it! I found a beautiful vase to put on my mantle downstairs.
We found a fun park and it was even a nesting place for Blue Herron, which was cool and also super stinky.
We had dinner at the docks where there is a floating neighborhood. We had fish and chips, of course, and it was yummy. And the houses were so pretty! It was so so cold!
After dinner we found a few more fun places around Victoria and then went back to our hotel to swim and ride their water slide. It was a pretty fun hotel.
We realized that night that we forgot to buy the ferry ticket to get back to the States the next morning, so we called and they told us to be there by 6:00 A.M. to wait in the stand by line. We did, and then had a few hours to walk around and then sleep in the car while we waited. We made it on to the ferry and then made it back to the U.S.! It was a fun few days in Canada!
We needed to make it back because that night we were meeting Avery's mission companion and her friend, Ever, that she taught while she was on the mission, for dinner in Enumclaw. The other Spanish missionaries serving in the area came to dinner with us too, and it was so fun to meet all of them. Avery's friend from the Spanish Branch worked there, so we got to meet her, too. After dinner we drove around Enumclaw (this was Avery's favorite area and she served here for 8 months) and then we went and played volleyball with the Branch. Our kids all said this was one of their favorite things they did on the trip.
We were so lucky to be able to stay at an Airbnb in Enumclaw that was on a farm of some of Avery's friends, the Day's, from the English ward in Enumclaw. The missionaries exercise there in the mornings and they had told everyone that if they left them a missionary nametag, they could come back and stay on their farm for free! So, Avery left her tag and we reached out to them a few months ago and they were so nice to let us stay there for the weekend. They also let us play in their gym, play with their animals, eat their delicious farm fresh eggs, butter, milk and raspberries and even milk their cow! They even fed us and the sister missionaries one night. They were so kind and generous!
Saturday morning we went on a hike that Avery loved in the area. It had a beautiful waterfall and the boys jumped in the water to cool off.
It happened to be the weekend of the Logging Festival in a nearby town, so we dropped in for a minute to watch some competitions and take our picture with a sasquatch. That night we had dinner with the Hermanas and the Day's at their farm and then Avery really wanted us to try some fries at a little food truck they used to eat at. When we got back to the farm, they were just getting ready to milk their cow, so they were very kind and let us have a try. We got a little bit of milk in the bucket, I think.
This was my beautiful view on Sunday morning, while I studied my scriptures. I think I was meant to live on a farm.
Church was nice. We met more of Avery's friends and everyone was so happy to see her. It was like coming home for her! They even had her get up and give a talk during Sacrament Meeting. Her mission president, President Henderson, and his family came to the Branch for church so that we would have a chance to meet them. That was fun and nice to be able to say thank you to them for taking care of her for 18 months! What a blessing for her to be able to serve in this mission! She has made life long friends and grown so much from her time there!
After church we took a drive to a super scary bridge. It looked and felt like it wasn't going to hold up! But the drive was beautiful! We found another cute little walk to a lake and then headed back to the farm. We were all pretty tired and grateful for a low key day!
The next morning we got up bright and early and made the long trek home. We made it home before midnight and had a beautiful firey sunset when we got back to Utah. What a great vacation! It was so long! Hahaha! We were ready to be back in our own beds that night. But it was a blessing to be able to be together, see family, be in a new country, meet so many people that influenced Avery, and see places that changed her life! We are grateful for her experiences she had in the Seattle Mission!
No comments:
Post a Comment