Saturday, July 11, 2009

Trip Part 1--Arizona

On our way to Utah this year we took a little detour through Mesa, AZ, where Ben's twin brother and his family live. We had a great time with them! They have 3 boys and just added a sweet baby girl to the family last week. Unfortunately, she waited to be born until after our visit, but that's ok. We loved seeing James, Lybi, Sam, Joey, and Adam.

Here are Brandon and Sam playing video games

Here's our attempt at getting a picture of all the grandkids together. Brooke was sleeping so she's not in the photo and we're also missing another important cousin, Ryan (who lives in NC), and the newest addition, Danielle. These were their funny faces.

Brandon, Kate, Carli, Megan, Joey, Sam, Adam
These were smiley faces, more or less. Megan was not happy about taking pictures, the stinker.
Here's Kate munching an apple. I love the one eye open, one eye closed in this one.Kate and Carli. They seem to look the most alike of all the kids.
After Arizona we headed up to UT. We stopped in for a BBQ with some old friends from Ohio that I grew up with who live just north of Pheonix and had a great time with them. We left a little later than we anticipated and still had a 7-8 hour trip up to Cedar City, UT, to spend the night at my parents' house. Ben thought maybe we should go around Cedar mountain so we wouldn't run into any deer, but I figured since it was the middle of the night deer wouldn't be a problem. Don't they say the biggest danger is at dusk and dawn? Well, I was sorely mistaken as we saw more deer than we cared to that night. As soon as we hit the canyon road there was a large group of deer just hanging out on the side of the road, one or two walking across at the time. We hit the brakes and at 2 am it sure woke us up as we were both quite tired. We were on the alert the rest of the hour drive over the mountain. We saw at least 20 deer that night, but we were surely protected by our Heavenly Father and not one deer made the mad dash into our van. They were docile and still, barely turning their heads as we passed by. Blessings in disguise as the deer kept us awake on that twisty canyon road.

We did finally pull into Cedar City at 3 am and thankfully had lovely beds to rest our heads. That afternoon we headed up to Snowbird to meet Ben's parents up at Snowbird. Next post!

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