Mind the Gap

Sometimes my wife just makes some delicious food, this weekend it was fondue!  We cut up a lot of fruit and veggies and made two batches.  One for Sunday night, the other for Monday night and invited a few friends over to share.  What's funny about living in Utah, is that not a lot of people have ever tried fondue.  Usually because it’s made with wine and in Utah that might require a trip to the liquor store.  Thanks to our friends in Omaha who gave us our fondue set for our wedding, we have a great recipe that substitutes apple juice for wine.  Our friends are blown away by it because in most cases it’s a treat that they’ve never had before (again the whole wine thing) and we get to show off how cultured we are.  #pattingmyselfontheback

Speaking of #hashtags, watch this clip:  http://youtu.be/57dzaMaouXA  #funny

Big adventure this week was making our trip to Zion National Park and hiking the Subway.  We’ve been talking about this for weeks and leaving the followers of this blog (all six of you) on pins and needles every week! 

BTW, big shout out to all of you who do read this blog.  We hope you find it fun and enjoyable. 

Wednesday night after work, we loaded up the car and headed to Zion.  We decided to run the canyon mid-week because it was a lot easier to get passes for the canyon. The weekend always seemed to get booked really quick. So since Kaela worked last Saturday, she had a day to take off this week.

Two years ago I decided to sell my Subaru Outback.  It was a beautiful car, leather interior, turbo engine, stick shift.  This car was a dream except for the fact that it kept having engine trouble that would cost $2000 + to fix.  The summer before I sold it, I did a lot of car camping.  Instead of setting up a tent or laying down on the lumpy ground I would lay down my back seat and stretch out comfortably with a sun roof above my head to watch the stars through.  When I was looking for a car to replace the Subaru I had a list in my head of a few features that it had to have.  The ability to car camp was one of them. 

Say hello to car camping with Bean!!!  Pulling off onto a dirt road sure beats paying for a crappy hotel.  And when there is a Maverick gas station just down the road with toilets and rotating shift times, it’s really easy to get away with not paying for a camp site.  

The Subway is a fun challenging hike that requires you to have a 60 foot rope to rappel down a few obstacles.  When I did the hike a few years ago, my friends and I used the rope more as something to hold on to as we scrambled down logs and rocks to get to the bottom.  This year, the canyon had completely changed.  Logs that had been there before that we had scrambled down or crossed to get to easier sections to scramble down were gone.  Logs had been washed into sections of the canyon that made other sections more difficult to get through.  I hadn’t expected this change in the canyon to be so different from last time.  Fortunately, we came prepared with a harness and rappelling gear.  Last time we hadn’t needed them, so I almost didn’t bring them.  As we descended the 30 foot cliff to get to the bottom of our last rappel I felt very grateful to have included the gear we needed to get down safely. 

Jim and Karen Wright came with us on the hike too and did it like champs!  I think I sugar coated some of the obstacles we were going to come across to convince them to come.  One thing we didn’t expect was the cold weather.  We went on the one day that the temps dropped 10 degrees cooler than normal.  It made for some tricky hiking but thanks to dry bags we were able to cross the water obstacles then put dry clothes back on.  

We didn’t run into many other groups while hiking, probably because of the cooler temps but we did see two guys from Israel a few times hiking down the canyon.  I don’t know what they do in Israel to make these guys so tough but they were hiking in t shirts, bummy running shorts, and duck taped Tevas.  Most of the hike they did in their bare feet.  Minimalists, eat your hearts out. 

We drove home the same night to get back in time for work the next day.   

Saturday Kaela went with Alyssa and Shana to the conference center for the Relief Society General Session after she got off work while I tore apart my four wheeler to replace a stripped out bolt to prepare for our upcoming desert trip!!!

#cliffhanger!

#our6followersbecome5duetoannoyingcliffhangers

#nexttime!

The Behind-the-Scenes Glimpse Into Temple Building

One thing I love about our lives is that the adventure never stops, it just slows down a little.  This week was supposed to be a weekend trip to Zion National Park to explore the Subway Canyon with Kaela’s cousins Jim and Karen.  Unfortunately, the popularity of the canyon makes it difficult to always get passes.  Although all of us put into the lottery to try and get passes, none of us were lucky enough.  (Good thing we don’t try our luck in Vegas very often.)  Hopefully we will get to go soon. 

Instead of heading south, we went north for the weekend up to Logan for USU homecoming.   The Aggies cruised over poor Weber State winning 70-6.  Earlier in the day I got a chance to go golfing with my dad, while Kaela and my mom had some mother-in-law, daughter-in-law bonding over a chick flick.  We enjoyed being away and hanging out with my parents.

Friday night, we got tickets to the Salt Lake Bees game.  They were playing Omaha in the PCL championship.  They won the game we went to but lost on Saturday and lost the series.  Good run by the Bees this year.  Always good to enjoy baseball.  Sorry to the women who sat in front of us.  We may have accidently spit a seed into her hair.  Hopefully she didn’t notice us getting it out for her. 

On Thursday this week, we had a chance to attend a special fireside with President Roberts, the stake president.  President Roberts is a facilities manager over temple construction and real estate for the LDS Church.  His job is to find property and oversee the construction of temples throughout the world.  This was a similar presentation he gave to the youth at youth conference earlier this summer, which was so good, our bishop asked him to present the same message to the ward.  He shared amazing stories of miracles that have occurred that has allowed the church to build temples where it would sometimes be extremely challenging.  Take the Paris, France temple for example.  They have had the Paris, France temple plan for almost 10 years now.  They finally found a property in an area near Versailles and were able to obtain permits to build a temple because the Mayor in that area is more conservative (he is the only mayor who doesn’t support gay rights even).  He said “I don’t know why I’m allowing this except that it just feels right.”  President Roberts then added that we should include him in our prayers as he is coming up for elections soon, and we could use his offices’ continued support. 

Other miracles have included the negotiation of property where 22 different people owned one site and they were able to close the property last week.  The Rome site has been a challenge in construction because of the standard the church has for its temples.  They flew the construction company into Salt Lake to show them the conference center and said this is your floor standard.  They looked back at him and said “we can’t build something this nice”  President Roberts looked back at him and said “you will build something this nice”   Slowly they have been getting it right, but their pace has been at times agonizingly slow, mostly because Italians are always on vacation.  One meeting between the church and the construction company included a member of the 70 who started the meeting.  Instead of talking about construction timelines or materials, he began talking about the family and its eternal nature and why temples are so important in this process.  The men took note and a few of them began to ask more questions about what he was talking about and a few of them have gotten baptized.  Hopefully, this will help speed the construction along. 

That’s all for this week.  Next week look for Kaela’s new ride.  ;)

Rawlins in Nawlins

So last week was the Rawlins family trip for the summer. It was Darrell's sister Mindy's birthday and we all met up in New Orleans and then cruised down to Mexico to celebrate. For the recap, let's start with New Orleans. We flew in Saturday and were tourists until we got on the boat on Monday morning. We went to the French quarter, took a bus tour of the city, ventured a few blocks up Bourbon street until we saw butts, and ate some beignets! I was bummed there wasn't more French influence than there was, but reading street signs and understanding little nuances was fun. We ate REALLY well while we were there. Darrell and I don't usually say a city's food is a main attraction, but New Orleans is a major exception. We ate a little snazzier Cajun one night and then a little dirtier Cajun the second night-exactly what we wanted. We added alligator to our list of sampled foods, and thankfully got to sample a lot of options because everyone pretty much shared their entrees between the family.

Note the beads hanging on the picture of the trees. Also, blue dogs are significant to New Orleans. Ask if you care to know why.
Darrell and I have also started a tradition where instead of buying t-shirts or something for souvenirs from places we go, we buy something for our house. Since we started, we have a painting of the St Michel bridge in Paris, some cool totems from Alaska, a Turkish rug, some Turkish and Armenian paintings, and now have some really cool coasters we bought in a flea market in New Orleans (I'd explain but I wouldn't do it justice) and a clay Mayan calendar from Mexico.
On to the cruise.... This was my first cruise and I'd like to think I did well. We did a lot of laying out on the deck, socialized a bit with trivia, karaoke, and the family style comedy shows. The rest of the entertainment wasn't too wonderful unfortunately. Getting to see Darrell's dad trying to shake balls out of box tied behind him was an entertainment highlight :) The food was again pretty good. We were proud we didn't gain more weight than we did. Chocolate melting cake, cheeses, and escargot were top of the list.

Our first port was Progreso, Mexico. We took a ride to the less popular but more gorgeous Mayan ruins, Uxmal. It was beautiful! We got drenched by a crazy downpour and then ate some less than authentic Mexican food. This just made us more determined to find real tacos at the next port.

 Yes our guide had a Samuel the Lamanite on the city wall moment. Darrell was trying to get a photo of him when his hands were in the air and he was yelling down to us.

Our second port was Cozumel. It was beautiful. We hopped a ride to a resort and went snorkeling. Those pictures will have to come later because they're currently in Logan with Ryan and Mariah :)
We hung out in hammocks and played in the ocean. We went shopping in the markets on the way home. Darrell is awesome at the whole bartering thing. Seriously. I blame it on his time in Turkey. And we finally found real tacos! We got some in the market and then our driver dropped us off a few blocks from the pier at a taco truck! It was soooo good! We tried to recreate it for dinner tonight but decided a Latin Market is going to be a better starting point than Winco.

Since we got home we jumped back into normal life. Darrell's gone on a ride with his pretty new bike and taught Elders Quorum on Sunday. We've both caught up at work and went on a good run tonight.
This weekend we will either be in Logan or hiking the Subway in Zion depending on whether we get passes :) Time will tell.