Trip to the West

We just got back from a trip to Colorado and Utah and had such a great time! It was our first time in Utah in 5 years and it was so great to reconnect with friends and family that are out there.

We started by flying to Colorado and spending time with my parents, two of my brothers and their families, and one of my cousins. We had great food and fun times, including pumpkin carving. The big event was a 15-hour train ride from Denver to Salt Lake City. I have traveled on a lot of trains, but never in America and it was fun to do it here. And so fun to take Nash and Ava on a train!

US trains are nice. I loved our first conductor. He looked and acted like he came straight out of an old movie. The other thing that cracked me up was at the Denver train station. We had so much luggage for our group that we decided to check some bags. Steve and Jon took our bags into this room where they didn't even know there own system for checking bags (maybe they don't do it much?). Then they loaded our bags onto a cart that had wooden wagon wheels! Another thing straight from an old west movie. I wish I would've gotten a picture. We were a group of 14, so we had fun visiting and playing games on the train. The kids had fun looking out the windows. Kati painted Ava's fingernails (a first for Ava), the kids colored and glued art projects, watched a couple Diego episodes on our laptop, enjoyed looking at cows and horses and mountains and tunnels out the window. I think the train went through about 40 tunnels as we crossed the Rockies. The views were spectacular. We took the kids to eat dinner in the dining car and we successfully got the kids to sleep (on blankets on the floor). We arrived in SLC at 11:00pm.

We spent the next couple days enjoying SLC. We stayed at a nice hotel downtown and walked and took TRAX around the close proximity. We toured some of the places on temple square, visited the giant conference center, went to the Joseph Smith Memorial Bldg, and went shopping and eating at the Gateway Mall. We ate the biggest pizza I have ever seen from The Pie in our hotel room, and Steve and I slept to the sound of Distant Ocean Waves (our kids' white noise in the hotel room to help them sleep).

We stayed a few days after the rest of my family left to spend some more time in Utah. It was so fun to connect with friends (why didn't I take pictures when I was with most of them?!). We had a family party at Steve's cousin's house. There was quite a crowd and it was a blast. My kids loved playing Guitar Hero--they looked like they had been doing it for years. I guess it comes from pretending to be a band at home. And Steve's genes.

We ate at some of our favorite Utah restaurants (namely Bombay House and Cafe Rio). And we hiked the Y with our kids! It was really fun; and also really hard to do with a 3 and 1 year old. Ava was in a backpack and slept the whole way up. Nash walked the entire way up! We sat on the giant Y for all of 5 minutes and then the kids got bored (and I got a little nervous someone was going to fall down the mountain) and we carried both kids back down, which was probably and surprisingly harder than going up. It was such a fun family thing to do, though! Nash's word of the week was "yo." It meant yes, no, what, hi, cool...anything and everything. A bit confusing, but really hilarious. He wanted to yell "yo" from the Y, but his silly parents forgot. He remembered about halfway down and almost broke out in tears, so we stood him up on a sign and he got to yell his "yo" for all of Provo to hear. Afterward, with shaky legs, we went to the BYU Creamery for ice cream--also really fun.

It was a great trip. And now back to normal life. It was really nice to get home, but we're loving all our great memories.