Greeley, Colorado
Given our mobile lifestyle, one would think that we were in a perfect position to have scheduled a trip to the zone of totality last week and witnessed the eclipse in all its glory, but instead we were back in Colorado Springs watching a not quite total eclipse with friends in their front yard from behind eclipse glasses hastily and gratefully purchased in a shopping center parking lot just days before the event and through cereal box viewers taped together the night before and on the shadows formed between our interlaced fingers.
We missed totality because the day following the eclipse we welcomed home missionary number four. And when I say 'home' I mean that he flew into the same airport that he flew out of two years ago. But, while we drove by the house he spent 8 years of his life in, he saw its glorious blue color for the first and possibly last time ever that day and then spent his first night home sleeping on a spare bed in the basement of our dear friends' house. I am so thankful to have good friends who took us in, helped us celebrate our missionary homecoming and especially let us eat their food and sleep in their beds (and on their floors and couches).
Having my children serve missions has really been a great experience for our family. We miss them terribly of course while they are gone, but we also love to get our weekly emails, love our Skype calls on Christmas and Mother's Day and love to learn about the places and the people where they each have served. Most of all, missionaries are just dear to my heart because I know that my life as I know it is because of other missionaries. My parents were taught and baptized by missionaries when I was an infant. I will never know who those missionaries were, and my understanding is that my parents went through many of them before committing to baptism, but I am so grateful to and for those missionaries and their families. Kris was taught and baptized by missionaries only a couple years before we were married, in this case I do know one of 'his' missionaries, thanks to a ward member who went out of his way to help us reconnect about twenty-five years later. And I am also eternally grateful to and for Elder White for serving a mission. Having my children out there serving and impacting lives the way I believe mine to have been is really a precious thing.
So missionary number four has returned, numbers five and six are still serving, and number seven is finishing mission papers and expecting to go early next year. I love the tradition of missionary service that my children have begun, and I hope that the rest of them continue to follow the tradition of their older siblings and choose to serve missions also.
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Ordinary Days
Greeley, Colorado
We aren't always out hiking amidst giant trees and towering waterfalls or exploring fantastic city scapes or ancient ruins. Many of our days are very ordinary. We play Monopoly. We read books. We do math. We wash laundry. We cook. The kids have been slowly working their way through all the Marvel movies. I finished a quilt. Right now we are back at my mom's house and in fact spent yesterday evening weeding the flower garden and catching toads.
We spent the week of the 4th of July living in Rexburg, seeing our older kids whenever they weren't in class or at work. And exploring the town on our own when they were. We had a barbecue. We went to a fireworks show. And we played at the park a lot. En route to Canada we met up with old friends who had moved and just hung out at a park for a couple hours. We went to a small family reunion in Boise and met extended family most of us never had before and had a really great time eating and talking and playing in the backyard. We spent 3 days in Ogden with no other agenda than visiting big kids again.
The ordinary days and the ordinary activities are important. First because laundry and cooking and school are all things that still need to get done. And because a daily walk with my husband and an almost daily yoga routine keep me sane. And weeding a garden and catching toads is just plain fun. Yes even the weeding. Without the ordinary stuff, we couldn't maintain the fantastic stuff. But also, the beaches and waterfalls and giant trees have all been great, but none of it beats having our grown up son crash on our couch and sleep the afternoon away or watching my little kids get to play in the river with their big sister and her husband or piling into a hammock with cousins they previously didn't even know they had.
So we look forward to more adventures and excitement, but we also plan to continue enjoying and celebrating the ordinary days.
We aren't always out hiking amidst giant trees and towering waterfalls or exploring fantastic city scapes or ancient ruins. Many of our days are very ordinary. We play Monopoly. We read books. We do math. We wash laundry. We cook. The kids have been slowly working their way through all the Marvel movies. I finished a quilt. Right now we are back at my mom's house and in fact spent yesterday evening weeding the flower garden and catching toads.
We spent the week of the 4th of July living in Rexburg, seeing our older kids whenever they weren't in class or at work. And exploring the town on our own when they were. We had a barbecue. We went to a fireworks show. And we played at the park a lot. En route to Canada we met up with old friends who had moved and just hung out at a park for a couple hours. We went to a small family reunion in Boise and met extended family most of us never had before and had a really great time eating and talking and playing in the backyard. We spent 3 days in Ogden with no other agenda than visiting big kids again.
The ordinary days and the ordinary activities are important. First because laundry and cooking and school are all things that still need to get done. And because a daily walk with my husband and an almost daily yoga routine keep me sane. And weeding a garden and catching toads is just plain fun. Yes even the weeding. Without the ordinary stuff, we couldn't maintain the fantastic stuff. But also, the beaches and waterfalls and giant trees have all been great, but none of it beats having our grown up son crash on our couch and sleep the afternoon away or watching my little kids get to play in the river with their big sister and her husband or piling into a hammock with cousins they previously didn't even know they had.
So we look forward to more adventures and excitement, but we also plan to continue enjoying and celebrating the ordinary days.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Sunday on the Road
Durango, Colorado
After two busy days of exploring we are relaxing after church. I have my LDS hymns Pandora station playing. Noah is getting leftovers ready for lunch. Kris is napping. Later we will get the big kids on hangouts when they too are all home from church. We will all email our missionary siblings and Noah will also email his missionary friend. We will take a walk in the neighborhood. We may play a game of Skip Bo or Greed. Probably we will try to see some shooting stars tonight if it isn't overcast. With our traveling lifestyle I think I have come to appreciate the restfulness of Sunday more than I may have in the past.
Wherever we are, when Sunday comes we find a church and attend a ward. Mormon.org makes this super easy, I type in where we are and they show me the closest building, the ward or wards that meet there, the Bishop's name and number, the missionaries' number, and the meeting times. Once Mormon.org failed me. We were in California, the nearby building had two wards and one was Spanish speaking. Guess who showed up for a Spanish speaking ward instead of the intended English speaking ward? Not only that, but we were too late for Sacrament meeting even, because they had started at 9 not 10 as the website had led me to believe. This margin of error could probably be eliminated if we routinely phoned the Bishop or assigned missionaries, which we did the week after that mishap, but on this trip we have had no issues and so have perhaps become lax. I learned today that when traveling outside of the US we can even filter for English speaking wards should we desire, though they are not to be found everywhere.
We have attended a different ward every week since we left my Mom's in June. It is an interesting experience to be a visitor every week. Fionnula's name gets pronounced all sorts of interesting ways and she has had different primaries sing her the famous primary welcome song (HELLO! hello!) nearly every week for almost two months. Different wards have different personalities and some are definitely better at the whole visitor thing than others. At one ward my boys were actually greeted in Sacrament meeting by another young man who then took the time after sacrament to get them all to the right classes too. That's a service that isn't always volunteered even by the adults and leadership in every ward, we frequently need to ask. A branch we attended that had no youth of their own made up a Sunday School class on the spot just for our two boys.
There are things about belonging to a ward that I miss, like not having a class of young women to teach, and my boys not participating in the blessing and passing of the Sacrament. I was so grateful to the branch that asked my boys to pass the sacrament because they had no young men. But overall, the visitor thing works out pretty well. The wards are not all on the exact same schedule with the lesson materials, so sometimes we get the same lesson we had last week and sometimes we miss a lesson or two. But the most important things are really just the same no matter where we attend.
After two busy days of exploring we are relaxing after church. I have my LDS hymns Pandora station playing. Noah is getting leftovers ready for lunch. Kris is napping. Later we will get the big kids on hangouts when they too are all home from church. We will all email our missionary siblings and Noah will also email his missionary friend. We will take a walk in the neighborhood. We may play a game of Skip Bo or Greed. Probably we will try to see some shooting stars tonight if it isn't overcast. With our traveling lifestyle I think I have come to appreciate the restfulness of Sunday more than I may have in the past.
Wherever we are, when Sunday comes we find a church and attend a ward. Mormon.org makes this super easy, I type in where we are and they show me the closest building, the ward or wards that meet there, the Bishop's name and number, the missionaries' number, and the meeting times. Once Mormon.org failed me. We were in California, the nearby building had two wards and one was Spanish speaking. Guess who showed up for a Spanish speaking ward instead of the intended English speaking ward? Not only that, but we were too late for Sacrament meeting even, because they had started at 9 not 10 as the website had led me to believe. This margin of error could probably be eliminated if we routinely phoned the Bishop or assigned missionaries, which we did the week after that mishap, but on this trip we have had no issues and so have perhaps become lax. I learned today that when traveling outside of the US we can even filter for English speaking wards should we desire, though they are not to be found everywhere.
We have attended a different ward every week since we left my Mom's in June. It is an interesting experience to be a visitor every week. Fionnula's name gets pronounced all sorts of interesting ways and she has had different primaries sing her the famous primary welcome song (HELLO! hello!) nearly every week for almost two months. Different wards have different personalities and some are definitely better at the whole visitor thing than others. At one ward my boys were actually greeted in Sacrament meeting by another young man who then took the time after sacrament to get them all to the right classes too. That's a service that isn't always volunteered even by the adults and leadership in every ward, we frequently need to ask. A branch we attended that had no youth of their own made up a Sunday School class on the spot just for our two boys.
There are things about belonging to a ward that I miss, like not having a class of young women to teach, and my boys not participating in the blessing and passing of the Sacrament. I was so grateful to the branch that asked my boys to pass the sacrament because they had no young men. But overall, the visitor thing works out pretty well. The wards are not all on the exact same schedule with the lesson materials, so sometimes we get the same lesson we had last week and sometimes we miss a lesson or two. But the most important things are really just the same no matter where we attend.
Mesa Verde Part Two (Saturday Aug 12, 2017)
Durango, Colorado
This morning we had tickets for a 9:30 am tour of Balcony House. We got up early, we ate cold cereal, I even put dinner in our borrowed crockpot in our borrowed kitchen. We were out of here, fed, showered, and with packed lunches in hand, by 7:45 am, and that is a huge feat for this family. One of the reasons homeschool works so well for us is that we do not have to pull off this same performance five days a week, 9 months out of the year.
The Balcony house tour promised to have us climbing a thirty foot high ladder and crawling through a tunnel that was only 18 inches wide. I actually got out my tape measure this morning to verify that my hips were less than 18 inches wide. I had a nightmare about this stupid tunnel last night. Standing at the trail head as our tour gathered I was comparing myself to others hoping at least a few of them fell into the category of "more likely to get stuck in the tunnel than me." I made it. It wasn't even close actually, it is narrow to get into the tunnel and narrow to get out, but I was never in any real danger of blocking the whole thing up and leaving everyone behind me in line stranded with no way out of the dwelling. Whew. Information presented at this tour was mostly the same as at Cliff Palace, but the tour itself was more fun. We climbed multiple ladders and crawled through two tunnels, we were actually inside the ruins and saw the springs that once provided water to the inhabitants. And this time we climbed out along the actual toe-holds (enlarged and with handrails added) that the inhabitants would have used themselves.
We only had one more thing to see on this side of the park, the Chapin Mesa Museum, so we stopped there on our way to Wetherill Mesa. Generally speaking we have steered clear of most of the visitor center stuff at the national parks, but we made exceptions for this museum and the peek into the research center at the park's entrance, which we looked at yesterday when we got our tour tickets. Because who doesn't want a glimpse of all the artifacts that have been dug up around these canyons?
Then we were on to Wetherill mesa on the other end of the park, where we saw Step House, did our Long house tour, visited the Badger House Community, oh, and ate lunch. And saw a rattlesnake. And wild horses. For reals, just like Man from Snowy River. Wetherill Mesa also featured the first flushing toilets we had seen since the entrance, so that was nice. There is one parking lot for all of this, so we parked and walked from one thing to the next. The tour at Long House was probably our best tour yet, though it did not involve as much adventure as Balcony House, we climbed a total of one ladder and there were no tunnels whatsoever. But the tour itself was more in depth and the ruins were immense. The ranger guide showed us petroglyphs on the walls right within the ruins, pottery shards in the fire pit, suspected 'cowboy holes,' where looters in the past broke through walls, and was able to describe many aspects of the daily lives of the Pueblo people who once lived here in much more detail than the other tour guides did. He wasn't exactly humble about that either, mentioning that there were a few rangers there who knew their stuff, presumably to include himself, haha.
My favorite random fact from Mesa Verde (as related by our Long House tour ranger guide): that there were 180 cacao jars found in the whole southwest region and that 166 of those jars were all in one storeroom in Chaco canyon. Whoever owned that storeroom, I feel a deep bond with them.
This morning we had tickets for a 9:30 am tour of Balcony House. We got up early, we ate cold cereal, I even put dinner in our borrowed crockpot in our borrowed kitchen. We were out of here, fed, showered, and with packed lunches in hand, by 7:45 am, and that is a huge feat for this family. One of the reasons homeschool works so well for us is that we do not have to pull off this same performance five days a week, 9 months out of the year.
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| Climbing back out of Balcony House |
We only had one more thing to see on this side of the park, the Chapin Mesa Museum, so we stopped there on our way to Wetherill Mesa. Generally speaking we have steered clear of most of the visitor center stuff at the national parks, but we made exceptions for this museum and the peek into the research center at the park's entrance, which we looked at yesterday when we got our tour tickets. Because who doesn't want a glimpse of all the artifacts that have been dug up around these canyons?
Then we were on to Wetherill mesa on the other end of the park, where we saw Step House, did our Long house tour, visited the Badger House Community, oh, and ate lunch. And saw a rattlesnake. And wild horses. For reals, just like Man from Snowy River. Wetherill Mesa also featured the first flushing toilets we had seen since the entrance, so that was nice. There is one parking lot for all of this, so we parked and walked from one thing to the next. The tour at Long House was probably our best tour yet, though it did not involve as much adventure as Balcony House, we climbed a total of one ladder and there were no tunnels whatsoever. But the tour itself was more in depth and the ruins were immense. The ranger guide showed us petroglyphs on the walls right within the ruins, pottery shards in the fire pit, suspected 'cowboy holes,' where looters in the past broke through walls, and was able to describe many aspects of the daily lives of the Pueblo people who once lived here in much more detail than the other tour guides did. He wasn't exactly humble about that either, mentioning that there were a few rangers there who knew their stuff, presumably to include himself, haha.
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| Long House |
Mesa Verde part One (Plus a quick Arches tour and the MTC too)
We arrived at our house in Durango late on Thursday night. We had left Ogden early that morning but made a stop first in Provo to tour the new additions to the Missionary Training Center there. Four of our missionaries have started out their missions there, but the rest of us had never been inside, so that was fun. Plus we got to humiliate our children by asking them to pose in front of the giant map of the world and point at their siblings' missions.The MTC stop was planned but then we decided to also detour through Arches National Park, which somehow we had neglected in our national parks itinerary, even though we were going to drive right by it! So we took two hours to drive through it. And took one short hike up to Landscape Arch even though it was much too hot to be out in the desert. When we got to our house we were tired and hungry and maybe a tad grumpy and were very grateful to discover that the owners of the home had stocked the kitchen with a few food and drink items for us. Yay, for quesadillas and fresh pineapple for dinner at 9 pm! Then Friday we headed to Mesa Verde!
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| Arches National Park |
We didn't get off too early after our late night, and we had to first fill up with gas and buy ourselves some food for lunch, but we managed to get to the visitors center near the park entrance by 10 where we lined up with everyone else to get tickets to the guided tours that are the only way to see some of the most popular attractions in the park. Then, tickets in hand to see all 3 ticketed tours over the next two days, we headed to the park entrance, where we learned that no, the parks do not keep a list of who has a parks pass and who doesn't, and if you leave yours at home you are out of luck. About an hour later, we were back at the same entrance, this time with our parks pass in hand and now ready to get started for reals.
We started with the Mesa Top Loop, stopping at every single stop around the loop to get out, read signs, take pictures, and generally gape at the ruins all around us. Next was lunch and then our first ticketed tour, the Cliff Palace tour. It was raining pretty good by now, but after our afternoon in Arches, it only felt good. The Cliff Palace Tour took us down up close to Cliff Palace and the ranger guide was full of information about what is known and what is surmised about the primitive pueblo people. We stood around and looked into a kiva, stuck our heads in through the window/door of one dwelling where we could see the paintings high up on the walls above us and then we climbed out of the dwelling by way of a ladder where the original inhabitants would have climbed right up the cliff using only little hand and footholds carved into the rock.
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| Cliff Palace |
After our tour we were ready to be off on our own a little and to see some petroglyphs too. Pictograph Point trail (which is apparently misnamed because there are no pictographs only petroglyphs which are different) starts at the Chapin Mesa museum and they close and lock the entrance gate at 6. We were beginning the trail at 4:45 and they told us it would take us two hours to walk the two mile loop trail. We had to sign in and tell them which car in the parking lot was ours and how many of us there were. The trail was a huge adventure, we squeezed through narrow passages between rocks, ducked under cliff overhangs and climbed up and down iffy rock staircases, but at the far end we were met with a rock wall full of petroglyphs! And our handy guidebook we had borrowed at the trail head included a partial translation. My favorite was probably the "whipping kachinas" who "straightened out the people," though I also appreciated the "all-powerful animal spirit" who watched over the people in their travels.
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| Petroglyph Point |
On our drive out we stopped at Far View sites, which we had intended to see on our way in, but missed the sign. These are ruins from when the people were building on the cliff tops instead of right into the cliffs, there are lots of these ruins within the park, in fact we had seen some already on our drive around the Mesa Top Loop, but these were more complex. All of the cliff top dwellings predate the cliff-side dwellings.
By the time we got back to the house it was another late night and we needed gas and groceries again.
Thursday, August 3, 2017
And now for some Waterfalls! Yosemite National Park.
Reno, NV
We decided we had seen enough trees and that we needed some waterfalls in our lives, so we headed next to Yosemite National Park and the promise of spectacular falls. And they did still have trees too. And supposedly bears. We started with a day in Yosemite Valley
The valley has all the big famous sites that everyone associates with Yosemite. It's also so popular that visiting it in July is a little more like visiting a Disney Park than it is like really getting out and communing with nature on any level, minus all the Disney employees who are obsessively cleaning up after those who like to throw their water bottles, kleenexes and candy wrappers on the ground. Even at our arrival time of 10 am it was immediately clear that parking was already scarce, so when we found a spot, we parked and left the car in favor of the shuttle buses that circle the valley all day (and well into the night). We hiked first up to Vernal Falls, along with approximately 1,000 others, some of whom were actually pushing strollers up an admittedly paved, but very steep trail. Vernal falls was pretty... but the paved portion of this trail only took us to a bridge from which we could see the falls way off in the distance. Maybe we should have gone further. But we didn't. We also saw Yosemite Falls and Bridal Veil Falls, neither of which was a hike, but rather short walks. At each of the falls there were dire warning signs everywhere about what could happen to you if you dared to climb on the rocks around the falls or wade in the water and still people were crawling all over those rocks, it was a little detracting from the beauty of the falls themselves. We did hike to one other water feature, but it wasn't a fall, we went to Mirror lake where some of us waded blissfully in the cool water. In most cases, bridal veil falls being the exception, we rode a packed bus to each destination, and hiked/walked with hundreds of others to our destinations.
Our goal for day two in the park was double fold: to ditch most of our fellow park visitors and to get up close to a waterfall. Hetch Hetchy came through for us on both counts. Hetch Hetchy is in the northern part of Yosemite, has its own entrance, and in comparison to Yosemite Valley is a lonely place. We hiked to Wapama Falls and only saw a handful of other hikers the whole way in and back. The hike goes first over the O'Shaughnessy Dam and then through an old train tunnel, which was a fabulous start. From there it is about 2.5 miles to the falls and a good portion of it was in direct sun and walking across ankle wrenching rocky trail. I admit I wondered, given the falls we had seen in the valley the day before if this was going to be worth it. It totally was. There are several bridges across the bottom of the falls and at least one of them was soaking wet and regularly getting splashed, we stood there a long time after our hot sweaty hike in.
We finished Yosemite on a third day by driving all the way through the park and over Tioga Pass on our way to Reno, Nevada, stopping at Olmsted Point and Tenaya Lake (because apparently I can never resist a chance to wade in ice cold water). We searched in vain as we drove for some of those bears the park kept warning us were there but which they obviously have hidden somewhere. Our wildlife sightings in our three days in Yosemite were restricted to deer, squirrels, blue jays, lizards and a snake. Cool, but bears would have been better.
We decided we had seen enough trees and that we needed some waterfalls in our lives, so we headed next to Yosemite National Park and the promise of spectacular falls. And they did still have trees too. And supposedly bears. We started with a day in Yosemite Valley
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| Vernal Falls... way back there. |
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| Wapama Falls |
We finished Yosemite on a third day by driving all the way through the park and over Tioga Pass on our way to Reno, Nevada, stopping at Olmsted Point and Tenaya Lake (because apparently I can never resist a chance to wade in ice cold water). We searched in vain as we drove for some of those bears the park kept warning us were there but which they obviously have hidden somewhere. Our wildlife sightings in our three days in Yosemite were restricted to deer, squirrels, blue jays, lizards and a snake. Cool, but bears would have been better.
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
Even Bigger trees. Sequoia National Park.
We can all now fairly confidently identify a few different types of giant trees including Cedars, Redwoods, and Sequoias, as well as some other less spectacular ones. We aren't experts, but we are definitely more aware than we were when we started thinking about a trip to the California national parks. We have climbed and walked through and over these trees and even squeezed in the space between three intertwined sequoias and looked up at the sky revealed way up high among the branches. We can tell you that a sequoia forest smells amazing (and a little like Lowes), and that in a redwood forest you will sometimes come unexpectedly upon spectacular maple trees draped with moss.
We spent two days last week exploring Sequoia and King's Canyon national parks as well as Sequoia national monument and national forest (another thing we are learning, the differences between National parks, forests and monuments... not all that much to someone who is visiting them really, except maybe that the parks are more visited and have better roads). On our first day we climbed to the top of Moro Rock, Saw the General Sherman tree and then the lesser visited General Grant tree and finally a big stump on Big Stump Trail which was probably not THE big stump for which the trail is named, but we were tired and on our way out of the park for the day so as soon as we saw A big stump, we took some pictures and headed back to our car. General Sherman is, of course the biggest tree in the world and so you sort of have to go see it, but everyone else feels the same way and so its a pretty popular trail. Grant's grove and tree however are in the less visited King's Canyon park (adjacent to and ran as one park with Sequoia) and the walk here was really much nicer and the trees still plenty as impressive as in Sherman's grove. I am sure this is an fine opportunity to make some sort of joke about the two generals for which the trees are named... but I've got nothing.
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| Definitely a big stump even if it wasn't the big stump |
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| Walking towards the roots of a fallen tree |
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