Zion National Park-Robertson Reunion

Love hearing Elder Robertson play the piano during his at home MTC!

Beautiful view from Lee's bike ride.  Shenandoah Valley is so lovely. 

Shanna's catching up a little! Her legs are pretty much the same length as Cal's!

Clark and I headed to Costco for our flu shots.  Pizza seemed in order for an "MTC" lunch. 

I had fun putting together some Halloween goodies for my adult nieces and nephews. 

Haley had some art displayed at the Central Office Exhibition!  We enjoyed popping over there one afternoon too see the display. 

The day Lee and I flew out to Utah I had a Relief Society president's meeting.  I wish I could have stayed for all of it, but got to be there for the first hour or so.  The Stake Relief Society president LOVES baseball, which I think is super fun.  I don't love baseball one bit, but it's fun seeing what other people love and how they like to incorporate that into their everyday lives. I actually go to to go to a LA Dodgers baseball game on my mission and it was one of the worst pdays! Very boring for me, haha. 

Lee and I headed out to Utah to see his family for a little fall reunion!  It was more the siblings and parents, but a couple of Lee's nephews came which was fun.

We flew out of Richmond, to Philadelphia, then to Las Vegas.  We went to Zion National Park for the day time fun, stayed the nights in Hurricane, UT. Los Vegas is a fairly close airport to all of that.

Haha I can do this!

Here is a waiting area at the Philadelphia airport.  Pretty fun.  Normally Lee and I wait to get on a plane.  No need to sit on the plane when you can sit in the lobby and space out, especially during COVID! We decided to finally get on when we saw about 4 people left in line.  We grabbed our bags and walked up to the check-in desk and we saw the few people that were in line start walking down the hall to get on the plane.  The lady at the desk told us that they gave our seats to someone else!  WHAT?!  I was SO mad.  Lee was very calm about it, but I let the lady know how upset I was.  How can you just give away seats?  You were still boarding the plane!  For some reason they figured we weren't there.  I am not sure how because we were at a transfer airport! We obviously got on the first leg of our flight and made it to Philly.  Ugh.  She almost wouldn't let us get on the plane.  Then she said something like, well I'm not supposed to do this but I'll find tickets for you.  Whatever.  They had our tickets and shouldn't have given then away.  Apparently they called our names and that we should go to the desk but we didn't hear that.  The flight announcements at the airport were not understandable.  We finally were able to get on the plane but we couldn't sit together even though our tickets that we check in online for were by each other! I was not happy about that. 

We decided to rent through Turo and had a Jaguar reserved.  For some reason they canceled our reservation. Lee found a Fiat convertible instead.  It was fun that it was a convertible, but had VERY small seats and not comfy.  We did put the top down a lot which was very fun.  We got to Vegas pretty late and then drove about 1.5 hours to Hurricane to stay at Lee's brother's vacation/rental house. 

Meanwhile at home the kids did a fire, made pizza, hung out with Christian and enjoyed some snacks. 

Sheldon made this meme or whatever it is about me and travel, haha.

The kids raked leaves too! 

Looks like they went to Family Dollar and enjoyed buying some treats!

It was fun getting pictures from our kids while we were gone.  We did some video calls as well with them.

We went to church at a ward in Hurricane and then headed to the campground later that afternoon.  We mentioned to Lee's sister about going to both hours of church of she asked us if we were doing that. Lee said "Of course!" We love our family but aren't going to miss church for them.  Kent & Saundra's vacation/rental house was really fun.  It was nice staying there.  We had our own bedroom and then shared the hall bathroom.  We split the cost of the cleaning fee so that worked out great.  I've seen this quote before but I love it and took a picture of it during our Sunday School. 

Time for the reunion! We headed to Zion National Park.  We hung out at a campsite for dinners which was really nice.  The drive was about a half hour from the house we stayed at. I loved the chicken tacos that Carl and Susan made for us.  So yummy!

Monday and Tuesday we went on hikes, hung out and ate together.  

Monday night we went on a night drive in Zion National Park.  We wanted to go through one of the tunnels but for some reason it was closed. 

Tuesday early afternoon we were on a bus heading to go on a walk with Lee's family on an easy trail. During the ride Susan started talking with a couple staying at Zion and they said they had just done Angel's Landing that morning.  We thought Angel's landing was closed so we didn't even look into hiking it.  We were leaving the next day and had to decide right away if we were going to hike it by ourselves, with no family.  If you're pretty fast it sounds like you can do the hike in about 3 hours.  We were all meeting for dinner that night so we had that to consider in our timeline.  We decided to get on another bus and head back to the Angel's Landing dropoff.  We booked it up AND down, running whenever we could. We definitely were the annoying hikers! We got to the top and back down in under two hours! It would have been fun to have stayed up there longer, but we took some pictures and did enjoy the view...then left. 

Thankfully it wasn't very crowded.  There is a part where you start using metal pull bars and chain link holds and sounds like often people get held up there just waiting to go up.  And waiting for people to come down.  There were lots of people there, but we hardly ever had to wait. 

Thankfully we got back in good time on the bus system as well.  Something happened...maybe a bus was down? Or they shut down a line for some reason?  We got back on and headed back to the campground.  Apparently Lee's family was stuck on a bus for over an hour. They didn't arrive back to camp much earlier than we did.  Lynn, Marv and Lee's dad had e-Bikes and got around just fine.  I would love to go back to Zion and bring e-Bikes! 

For Sunday and Monday all of Lee's siblings and parents were together except Keith.  When he found out we were all down there he skipped work and drove on down, surprising us all!  It was so fun that they all could be together!

We had fun at the restaurant that night.  Aaron and Joseph, two nephews, were there as well.  

The place had heat lamps outside which was great. The "fun" started when they brought me cold fries. I told them they were cold and asked for new ones.  Then I was looking at my burger and there was a hair on it.  Gag!  So then they brought me a new burger and new fries and gave me a free dessert. 

More pictures out of order.

Lee's bike ride with Kent. They also went on a drive in the Fiat.

We had a 5:00am flight.  We stayed and visited at the campground for a little while, said goodbyes, then went back a slept a little bit before heading out. It was a nice trip.  It would be fun to bring the kids there during the fall. 

Since we flew out of Richmond we enjoyed driving by the temple on the way home and seeing the building progress!

 We made it home that evening.  It was so great that since Clark was home doing MTC, there was a warm body adult there and we didn't have to worry about finding someone to watch our kids during a long trip!