We did eat our Thanksgiving off of my coffee table while we watched some football of course. Deeds and I make a great Thanksgiving feast team! The Grossen's came over that morning and we also ate stuffed mushrooms. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. It was a great holiday! So much to be thankful for! And so many leftovers to last me the whole next week!
We spent a lot of quality time playing with the little Jack attack. He gets cuter every minute! My favorite new trick of his is saying "please" and "thank you". You can't resist giving him a bite of whatever you are eating when he comes up and looks at you with his adorable face and says, "pees" while making the sign for it. Melts your heart! And his "thank you" is more like "shi shi"...I guess he's learning to speak Mandarin too.
I love this pictures because Jack looks so pumped up about this little Elmo, and his drooliness was in tip-top shape that weekend...more teething.
The following weekend, my friend, Heather, and I went on a quick road trip down to Moab. I had been to Moab a couple of times for work, but never for play. It is an awesome place! Friday morning we headed straight down to the Monticello Temple and did an endowment session. It was so peaceful and beautiful there! And the temple workers were all the sweetest people on earth.
After the temple, we went to a local restaurant for lunch called PJ's. There is just such a different vibe in small towns. It sort of cracks me up. Let me just give a little description of this place. We walk in and it has a huge vaulted wooden ceiling. There is a table of very hairy and burly men who are all covered in dirt and paint eating lunch. There is an old couple in the kitchen cooking all the food, and there is beautiful young Asian girl working the register (who, come to find out, was studying to go to culinary school). Then there were Heather and I still in our church clothes. What an odd gathering of people! I'm am grateful for the few minutes we were at the same place in Monitcello, UT. They sure had good french fries!
After lunch we headed to the south end of Canyonlands National Park. This brings me to another funny story. We drove in and stopped at the visiters center to change our clothes and to pay the entrance fee. I was pretty excited. I've never been to Canyonlands before. So I walk up to the ranger man and asked, "What should we do with the daylight we have left?" In my mind, I was thinking he would have some great suggestions of view points we should go to, maybe a place to watch the sun set, possibly some short hikes we could go on, anything to maximize the hour and a half that we had. This was his response, in a very monotone voice, "drive down to the end of the road and look at the scenery." It took everything in me to not start to laugh. And from that point on, that became the tagline of our trip. I think he really loved his job! :) So here is a picture of Heather and I with the scenery at the end of the road. It was beautiful!
This is Newspaper Rock....hieroglyphics are so dang cool!
Then we headed back to our hotel in Moab, and grabbed some dinner. The next morning Heather ran the Moab Winter 10k (which was the whole point of us going down to Moab, I guess I should I have mentioned that earlier). This was her before the race. She ran it in 1 hour and 39 seconds. SOOOO impressive! I have been humored by how many times I have been asked since we returned if I had ran the race too. Are you KIDDING me? I would still be in Moab as we speak hospitalized if I had tried to pull something like that off. Big props to Heather!! And did I mention it was freezing there? I think it might have been about 22 degrees when she ran.
After a quick shower and a little bit of shopping (where we each bought a Moab hoodie, which will be featured in the rest of the pics), we headed off to Arches National park.
This is Heather in front of the Three Gossips.
The infamous Delicate Arch. I thought it was important to see the thing that appears on the Utah license plates. We didn't have time to do the long hike out to it, so we just went to a view point. Heather became one with the arch.
This is called Skyline Arch, and I think it was my favorite little hike of our whole trip. The photographer nerd inside of me really loved this tree. I took a ton of pictures of it. I've inluded only one for your viewing pleasure. Isn't it so cool?!?
It is a very beautiful place this state that I live in! Look at that diversity so close in proximity!
This is called Sandstone Arch. You had to hike up a narrow sandy path to find it...pretty cool!
It is a very beautiful place this state that I live in! Look at that diversity so close in proximity!
Our last stop was Balanced Rock. This is sort of mind-blowing. How does it not just tip over? Of course we had to do the classic holding-up-the-rock picture. Thank you, Heather, for playing my photography games!
The last adventure to report was getting pummeled by salt that a snow plow was dumping through Spanish Fork canyon. There was at least 2 second where I all I could see was salt through my windshield. Terrifying! We beat the snow storm home for the most part. What a great trip!
The last adventure to report was getting pummeled by salt that a snow plow was dumping through Spanish Fork canyon. There was at least 2 second where I all I could see was salt through my windshield. Terrifying! We beat the snow storm home for the most part. What a great trip!
Me and Amber
