mid-November = time for Chuck and me to ditch our kids with Grandma Pam and hit the open road! This trip was especially looked forward to because it's what got us through the slight craziness of Chuck heading up the Thanksgiving feast at the church the Saturday prior.
Carma was less than thrilled with the plan this go-round. My mom tried explaining that we were just going on a date... a multi-day date... to make up for the weekly dates we should be going on but aren't. Carma cried a lot and said from now on we have to go on more dates that are shorter haha.
Luckily Grandma Pam is amazing and had Carma June distracted and happy in no time, in part thanks to this list they started:
Also Grandma Pam got to go to assemblies at the elementary school two days in a row! First to watch cute Will be part of the color guard at an assembly honoring Veterans' Day...
and then to see Jack receive an award for being exemplary at the character trait of the month:
Other cute pictures of Carma - she clearly did juuuuust fine without us:
And as always, the boys rallied and adapted to our absence just fine. Grandma introducing them to the Pokemon club at the Boise Library helped quite a bit!
Chuck and I started our voyage with a trip to the car wash, because we're old and heading out in a clean car brings us joy:
Our first destination was Hyrum, Utah and we showed up for dinner and then nonchalantly asked if we could stay the night too, because we're classy like that ;). Shelly fed us delicious food and the boys kept us so entertained and we drank milk out of boxes and it was the best visit ever. We didn't end up having time to check out the Pepperidge Farm factory/outlet so Shelly gave us some Milanos for the road. She's the best.
It just made sense to choose Logan as one of our temples for this trip, and Shelly let us crash her weekly trip there that morning:
It was beautiful and SO busy and lovely.
We ate lunch in the cafeteria there and it was heavenly. Chicken cordon bleu and (Idaho!) mashed potatoes? Take me back.
I'm so grateful that thanks to so much maturity and sacrifice and love and compassion showed by parties involved, Chuck and I never had to choose between Dan and Shelly. It would have been impossible. I love that they're still a family that our family loves and gets to spend time with and be blessed by their friendship.
From Logan we headed south and FINALLY stopped in Brigham City. Pretty much every time we drive to Kaysville... or Lehi... or Provo... or Salt Lake... we look wistfully out the window and tell ourselves that sometime we'll go off the beaten path a bit and check out Brigham City. And today was the day! The temple was so sweet and not busy AT ALL...
... leading to a lot of excitement when we walked in haha. Per my instagram caption: "Highlights of the Brigham City Temple were getting to do sealings with my hot husband 👨🏻👀😘 and also EVERyONE there being SO excited to welcome us. It’s a smaller temple and a little off the beaten path, so they were thrilled that we found our way there and Chuck and I felt immense guilt every time we had to shake our heads no when someone asked if we knew so-and-so in Nampa/Boise/Meridian 😬😂. Finally I was able to honestly say I had seen the trucks of a certain plumbing company (owned by a daughter-in-law’s father 🧐) and a sweet old man beamed ☺️😅."
Quinn and Eden hosted us that night because they're awesome.
Which meant we got to see these darling goofs in the morning before we headed out. We loooove them!
Our next adventure was visiting Nicole... who randomly builds houses in her free time NO BIG DEAL. I've followed along with the progress via Marco Polo and a couple in person visits and Chuck and I decided it was time to actually put in some sweat equity, so we showed up and painted! Aka Chuck painted a lot and I painted a bit and tried not to mess anything up. Then we went to eat and say good-bye and Chuck got these swell candids haha:
Nicole is just the coolest. She's such a doer - she sees problems or difficulties and just rolls her sleeves up and jumps in. She has a vision and she learns and experiments until her vision is fulfilled. Being around her is so empowering because she's has so much confidence in the people she loves. Like, I walk away from here thinking I can do anything... and then I remember my habit of prioritizing naps and reading books over actual exertion and effort haha.
Our travels next took us a bit back north and eventually meeting for dessert with Chuck's sisters and assorted family members!
We crashed in Kays that night which let us see these two darling girls off to school in the morning...
and then we commenced our (very slow) journey home. I don't even remember how many D.I.s we made it to this trip overall... but it was a lot haha. Pretty grateful for my best friend who likes to road trip with me and talk about whatever for five hours and lets me blast my music and loves hitting up thrift stores almost as much as I do.
And thus concludes another pretty amazing 72 hour date... still not feeling super motivated to give up these trips in favor of weekly outings haha - don't tell Carma!
