The continuation...

So I am finally getting around to finishing up our travel log from our trip to Utah. Matthew joined TJ and I in Utah on Sept 19th, and on the 20th we went to the Church's Humanitarian Center in Salt Lake for a tour, and that was really cool to see how much good the church is prepared to do, and has done, at a moments notice. As part of the tour, there was a video talking about disasters around the world where they have sent supplies. It showed the earthquake in El Salvador, and Matthew had actually been serving his mission at the time of the earthquake and saw a few of his companions in the video helping with the clean-up. It brought back a lot of memories for him and was a very neat experience.

Friday we headed down to Parowan and the rest of the siblings joined us there Saturday, except for Kyle and his family since his son had strep throat. My parent's had planned a very cool family activity for us where we learned a lot about our ancestors. My mom had gathered information about 28 different ancestors and we were all assigned one person and and we were supposed to be very familiar with that person so we could present it to everyone else, and there were pictures to go along with pretty much everyone. Here is a picture of my mom standing by the big board where we put our pictures once we were done telling about them. It was really neat to learn more about where we came from and the type of people who have gone before us.

Matthew had never seen Cedar Breaks, which is up Brianhead (and Cedar) Canyon, about 30-45 minutes from my house, so we took a little trip up there with Michelle, Nick and their boys. TJ fell asleep in the car, which is why he isn't in this picture with us. It is such a beautiful place, and it had snowed up there so the snow on the red rock was a cool contrast. It's kind of like a mini Bryce Canyon.

Another fun experience we had while in Southern Utah was climbing the "P". For those of you who aren't familiar with Utah's tradition, each city (or probably most cities anyway) have a hill or mountain with the first letter of their city on the hill, or a big "Y" in the case of Provo. Matthew had never climbed the P hill in our 5 years of marriage, so my mom watched TJ for us so we could go on a little hike. Here is a picture of Matthew with my beloved Parowan in the background. This was one of Matthew's favorite experiences of the entire trip to Utah.

The same day that we hiked the P we went down to Kolob Canyon, which is again, about 45 minutes from my house. What can I say, Parowan is surrounded by beautiful places. This picture doesn't do it justice, but it is absolutely amazing. It had been years since I had been there and I had forgotten how beautiful it actually was. My mom had stopped at KFC and brought dinner up there for us, but she forgot to grab plates, utensils, napkins, etc. She was able to find a couple forks in the car, and we just had a community dinner where we were all dipping into the same bowl of potatoes, cold slaw, etc. :-) It was a fun and memorable experience.

Well, this entry is long enough so I think I am going to call it quits. We will post about Halloween soon.