Road Trip to Utah

We decided to make a quick trip out to Utah in the middle of our 2 month beach stay. Each October my siblings and parents have a get together. This year was a Blair's house in South Jordan.

We also wanted to visit Heather and Damon & Macall's family, help Lizzie move to her new townhome where she will be living for her college years, and also visit Maddy, Preston, and Don and Kathy.

Having just purchased the new Land Rover we looked forward to making the trip in it. No more electric charging, yay! Seat massagers, yay! Built-in mini-fridge, yay! Riding high, yay! This vehicle is a wonderful road trip machine.

We take our last walk along the beach at sunset the night before departing. That's actually the full moon on the horizon behind us. It was beautiful as the moon rose and the sun set at the same time. The glow on the windows is the setting sun.

In the morning we packed up the Discovery and headed out.

Mitzi and I shared driving turns, we make a great team.

We stayed overnight in Elko, Nevada. We ate at Luciano's for dinner. We are so used to masking up in California that when we walked into the restaurant and nobody had masks on, not even in the lobby waiting area, we were startled. It was a very pleasant evening.

We were introduced to Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos in Iceland last year on our trip with Lizzie. Mitzi found some on our trip and we enjoyed eating them again!

I made Chocolate Toasties sourdough along the trip so I could bake some for Preston/Maddy & Don/Kathy after we arrived.

We didn't get a picture of the Janis family get-together at Blair's. We had a nice time seeing everyone and visiting for a few hours.

The next few days were so fun. Don and Kathy made us a wonderful fried chicken lunch. I don't get the opportunity very often to eat the famed Chicken Inn fried chicken so I ate so much I was in a lot of pain. Totally worth it! I did take a little nap on the couch afterward while Mitzi and Maddy visited with Don and Kathy.

Maddy had decorated her house for fall so nicely. We didn't get a picture of Preston except for his legs and the tip top of his hair, see if you can find him :)

We visited with Damon/Macall/Navy/Cobalt. They are always so fun to visit. We ate caramel apples, Navy demonstrated her halloween costume and she was in full character mode, Mitzi played with the children and carried on a conversation at the same time. We love being grandparents! Damon also took the Discovery for a drive and loved it.

Then we enjoyed a wonderful lunch and conversation with Heather at Texas Roadhouse!

We decided to sell the Pebble house. We love it. It has served Mitzi's family so well for about 14 years, and I have been so grateful to enjoy it's comforts for the last 3 years. We had committed to keeping the house at least until Lizzie graduated from high school to help keep her life stable. Now that she is on to college it feels like the right time for Mitzi and I to forge ahead with our lives and create something new together.

We don't know where we want to live, so we are embarking on a journey of living in various places until we figure it out. Then we'll build or buy and have a more permanent domicile. In the mean time, life will be an adventure!

Val recently got her real estate license and we asked her to be our agent for selling the Pebble house. We are very excited to do this with her! Here is a picture when we signed all the listing documents. She is great in this new role and work!

We helped Lizzie move in and organize her new townhouse. It's one of our rentals. When Mitzi and I bought it a couple years ago we thought, "Now this is a great place and we would be comfortable here if we ever needed a place to live!" We are very grateful that Lizzie gets to enjoy it for her college years. It's really a perfect place. She purchased her kitchen dining set, couch, and other furnishings, making it her personal place. She's moving into the adult world with grace, which happens to be her middle name – literally. We are very happy for her!

Mitzi has always made my birthday super fun and special. She bought me new shirts from LuluLemon (I'm creating a new wardrobe that is classy and simple). We did a couples massage and I got a facial. She got me Durango's for an early lunch and we had a wonderful dinner at Anasazi with Lizzie.

Sydney, Maddy, and Lizzie got me a gift card to LuluLemon. Heather, Damon, Macall, Spencer, Laura, Baylie, and Emily all sent me wonderful notes and letters of appreciation and love. I spoke with Taylor on the phone.

A wonderful wonderful day! I felt very loved and appreciated and am profoundly grateful for these wonderful souls who love me, care about me, and give me a place in this world.

Oh, and I got my hair cut.

My birthday is the day before the anniversary of Brandon's bicycle accident. Mitzi and her girls are so kind to me on my birthday, and the fact this is a difficult time of year for them attests to how wonderful and loving and kind they are to make it special for me when it's such a hard time for them.

The grief they feel for their terrible loss is something familiar to me. It comes without an invitation, it permeates our being, it's disabling.

We traveled back to Pajaro Dunes by plane on the 10th, the 4th year anniversary of the accident. Making it more difficult than it already was, we had to deal with oppressive face mask measures and our plane out of St George had a mechanical issue that delayed the departure by 3 hours.

They had us deplane and wait in the terminal. We raided the little vending machine and found ... canned tuna salad crackers. We had such a fun time eating them and other treats that it lifted us out of the doldrums and brought smiles to our faces.

The security line shut down and some of the workers were "eating" at a table near us. Honestly the reason they were there, and the reason we got vending machine food in the first place, was an excuse to not wear our masks! Strangely the virus understands it would be unfair play if it were to infect someone while they are eating, so that is allowed. We have a lot of jokes about how smart this virus is based on the disjointed and illogical rules humans have come up.

So we took a picture of our security people "at work" off work haha.

I had an opportunity to upgrade us to 1st Class on the flight from Phoenix to Monterrey. It was so nice to get that reprieve and little gift.