In our Own Back Yard

We travel all over the world to see the beautiful sites and sometimes we forget to look close at home for that beauty.

We took a trip to Snowflake and drove through the desert. It was very green from the rain and so beautiful. Canada was amazing, but so is Arizona.

I think we're that way about people

sometimes too. The best ones are really here in our own back yard.

Oh, Canada

The first reason we loved Canada was the company.

Who are those old folks?

We don't look like much, but we sure do have a good time!

We rode a gondola to the top of one of the mountains and then Allan, Brent and I hiked even higher.

View from the top. Wow!!

This picture does not do it justice! It was spectacular!

Next stop-The Canadian Palace. This is now a museum and has lovely gardens.

There are many old hotels in Canada. They were built by the Canadian Railroad to encourage tourism in the late 1800 and are quite amazing and beautiful.

Room rate then $5---Room Rate now $600. They are national historic sites so you can visit for free. Guess what we chose to do.

The hotel overlooks the Bow Falls and Bow River. Rafting his river sure looked fun, but was not a good choice for us old folks.

Scenes of Beauty everywhere you look!

Lake Minawanka. We took a boat cruise to Devil's gate.

This is another railroad hotel. This one is at Lake Louise. It was a beautiful, tranquil place that we loved.

This was a very cold, glacial lake. No swimming here, but paddling a canoe looked fun. All the glacial lake's color was a pale, cloudy (caused by rock dust from the glacial movement) blue--check out the color of Brent's eyes sometime. They're just the shade of the lake.
Lake Morraine was another beautiful lake. It was freezing cold and raining this day.

Look what came in handy. "Anybody can wear it!"

One of the most amazing experiences was walking on the Columbia glacier, which is the tip of the ice fields in the area. It goes for miles and miles behind the moutain that you can see.

It was much different than expected-Icy, bumpy, rivers and riverlettes all over it. We were only on the tip of the glacier. It goes back for many, many miles.

Riding this big snow bus was about Brent's favorite thing. You should have seen the first hill we took. Yikes!

Canadian tourism is alive and well.

The hole in the ground to the left is the birthplace of the Canadian Park System. Three explorers went down the hole, found a hot springs and developed a mountain spa at this site. Tourists loved it and everybody got rich, except the tourist. Everything was sooooooooooooooooo expensive in this area.

The middle picture is how the spa was in the 1800's. There was also a warm thermal spring coming up out of the ground.

Takkakah falls was named for the Cree Indian word

for magnificent. And it was!

We also went to an old train station in Lake Louise. It has been there almost a hundred years. It was a charming place to have lunch and enjoy the railroad history of Canada.

And all this at less than 80 degrees!

Not much wildlife. They heard Brent was coming and went on vacation. A few big horn sheep, a single deer, and some mule deer, a ground squirrel or two. But there are always zoos to see!

Oh, Canada. We will miss you! It was a great trip.

OCD personified

So..... while the rest of you are putting out blogs of your adorable children (our adorable grandchildren) and all the cute things that they're doing, Brent and I have nothing to report but that we have been indulging our ocd natures.

Obsession #1 Cleaning

We got it into our heads that we needed to dust, polish, sweep and wash all the plant shelves, furniture, fake plants, cabinets, etc. in our house. It's the thing our parents called "spring cleaning". We hadn't done it for many springs, so we were way overdue. We spent the whole morning of every day for a week(when we weren't with those adorable grand kids we talked about) cleaning. So, here is the results.

So.. you say you can't see one bit of difference from the way it looked last time you saw it, well.... neither can we, but we sure feel better about ourselves. Sad, isn't it.

Obsession #2

Rachael loaned me a book a few months ago and told me that she loved it. I'd hear about it from several friends who recommended it, but did so in quiet tones and with some embarrassment. I was not a bit sure about the subject matter of the book-romance, vampires. Silly! So, I decided definitely not to read it. Then I came across it one day last week and decided to give it a try, since Rachael was re-reading the whole series of three books. Well, that was the end of my week. I am sorry to admit I am hopelessly, helplessly hooked and waiting impatiently for 9 days, seven hours and 23 minutes 12 seconds to pass until Breaking Dawn (Book 4) comes out. I read Twilight in 24 hours. Then I started looking around to find somebody to loan me the others. I found lots of closet Twilight fans among my "mature" group of friends and finally one loaned me the other two books. I read all three books in the Twilight Series in five days. That's about 1800 pages. I was up reading at 2 am several days. Just had to finish that chapter and see how Edward and Bella survived. I have read the website for Stephanie Meyer and have seen every clip of the upcoming movie that I can find on the Internet. PLEASE HEED MY WARNING. Do not read Twilight if there is an ounce of ocd-ness, romance or adventure in your soul. You will be sucked in and nothing that you need to do with get done. But it will be a delightful adventure! (Thanks Linsey for the updates from your friends on the conjecture about Book Four and the end of the story.)

Obsession #3

Brent and Grandpa Bird and the Diamondback ballgames. No further comment on that!

Enjoy those cute little people that you show me all the time, don't read and don't clean. Your summer will be so much better!

Resist the urge!

So here's "The rest of the story..."

Emily wrote about our wonderful trip to Disneyland with her family. Check out her blog. It's great! Going with four adults and four kids is the way to go! We had such a great time. Somebody with whom to share every experience. I loved being partners with Tatum most of the time. Since she wasn't big enough for many rides and I got motion sick on the bus going to Disneyland, she and I had a great time waving at everybody as they whirl around. It was such a fun time.

After the Stewarts left for home, we traveled down the coast to San Diego. We stopped on our way at Capistrano Mission. It was a beautiful place and we enjoyed wandering around it for an hour or so.

It was a wonderful old mission and you all know how I love a good ruin!

Speaking of a couple of old ruins, here we are enjoying the trip.
Our first try at the "hold the camera out and shooting" method so perfect by Scott and Jenna on our French vacation.

Then it was on to Oceanside, just to remember our fun trips there.

Anybody recognize the condos?

That was a fun memory for us.

Sadly, a fire had closed down the Ruby's (it's open again now) on the pier. Still a lot so fishmen and smelly fish to see. But we hadto eat "pain and fromage" on a little bench near the codos we stayed in.

We enjoyed San Diego and so many of the places we'd been as a family years before.

We loved seeing........................

Old Town with it's great little Mexican restaurant and

cute shops. The Mormon Battalion Memorial is closed for remodeling.

Seaport village was fun, if you don't mind watching the "ships
crash into the Coronado bridge."

We also visited the "Del" on Coronado Island and Mission Bay. (We even drove through Campland by the Bay. (It's just as white trash as ever and we loved it!), Balboa Park.etc.

And then we saw a new favorite for Brent. The USS Midway.

Does anybody remember the time we spent on the Queen Mary? You remember giving me a hard time about how much time I spent looking at things.

Well.................................................................................................., that's nothing compared to

FOUR HOURS WE SPENT ON THE MIDWAY.

Brent needed to see every inch of it.

I must admit it was interesting. We saw planes of the vintage that Keith Strong flew and hear old, retired pilot volunteers talk about their life on the ship. They gave us a very good picture of life as a Sailor. (I choose to be the Admiral and not the enlisted man. Admirals had a life of being pampered. Enlisted men were like Rats in a cage. Yuck!

San Diego was a great, relaxing end to our trip. Crazy fun with the Stewarts and then low key relaxing for the old folks on their own. Summer is sure fun!

What a weekend!

What a nice weekend we had. It was brimming with great things to do and we did them with some of our favorite people. It was just a really good time.
Friday we had a swimming/BBQ party with our three younger kids’ families at Grandpa Bird’s house. This was always our tradition when the kids were at home and it just feels like the thing to do on the 4th of July. None of the older ones could come. Jen is in Utah, Emily had just had some surgery and wasn't up to it, and Ryan and Linsey were helping her sister and brother-in-law move. They were supposed to be getting ready for their own move and maybe coming to our party, but Chad fell off the moving truck and broke both is arms. So, Ryan and Linsey jumped in to help (That’s what you call selfless service). What a tough thing for Chad and Emily!

Then Friday night I finished up the quilt for Ryan's family. It made for a nice, quiet July 4th evening and we have decided that it's OK to be boring at this stage of our lives. When we were boring earlier in life it was sad, now it's OK.

While I worked on the quilt we watched the Tour de France. We're not really into cycling, but we love seeing them go through the French countryside. It's so neat to see it. One of the legs this time goes through a tiny little city high up on a hill in the middle of France that we just love. It's call SonFluer. We discovered it by accident a few years ago and adored it. This year they go through it, so we can't wait. There are always places we've been and others we haven't seen, but look just like a million little villages we’ve driven through. So, we like watching it. We've had it on every morning so far and it's been fun.

So glad to have the quilt done. I love quilting and would like to have one to work on all the time, but this one has been put off too long and was getting to bug me. It turned out well and Ryan was happy to get it, finally. It was his birthday present and I got the top done in Oct. for his birthday, but it's taken me until now to finish it. Not my usual OCD style of “obsession until it’s done”. I'm so glad I got it done before they moved.

We had the Webb kids on Sat. am for about half an hour. We have been "on call" ourselves all week, since Klint has also been “on call”. We kept thinking that we would have those cute little boys and then Klint would get off early and we wouldn’t get to see them. We sure like it when the grandkids come around. It turned out that we only took them for an hour or so two times during the week. We got some of the Stewart kids for half a day this week too. You know the old Primary song, “It’s always fun when Grandpa comes”. Well, we sing it as “It’s always fun when Grandkids come”. Being a Grandparent is the BEST!

Sunday morning Stacy and Derek blessed little Trevor. Jen was in Utah and Klint had a triple bypass surgeries scheduled, so we didn't have them, but the rest of the family was there. So was Derek's family. We really enjoy his parents, so it's always nice to have time together at these occasions.

Some of the Allen’s friends were also there. I got to see one of my preschoolers from last year, Kate. It’s so fun to have little friends all over the world to see and enjoy again.

Derek did a great job with the blessing and Stacy had everything perfect for the party after.

It was a wonderful occasion.

Only things missing were some special people.

Linsey stayed at home since they didn’t have a car here to carry them all/ One big car is already gone to Utah and one is broke down. We do hate the car trouble thing.

Jen and family were in Utah. We hate the sharing Grandchildren thing.

Klint was at the hospital. We also hate the 15 hour surgery day thing. We don’t like anything much that keeps our grandkids and their parents away. So, we missed them.

But we all had a wonderful time at Trevor’s blessing and party.

I did a big "fruit arrangement" like the company edible creations does. It was fun to try and turned out OK. I’ll try it again for another occasion.

Sun afternoon we spent with our student ward at Break the Fast Dinner. It's always so much fun for us to be with the young adults and with the Bishopric. The adults all sit together and we laugh and have such a fun time. I guess it was extra special, and a little nostalgic to me since it could be the last time that we are with them for this event. The Stake is being realigned and changed from 8 wards to 4 wards. So the high counsel members will mostly not have a ward assignment. We just hate to leave this ward after almost two years with them. It feels like home. We find out in two weeks what the new wards will be like and which bishops will stay and where, if anyplace, we will be assigned. If we don't have an assignment we will be going back to attending our home ward and I will probably get a job, although it will have to be something that gives me some room to go with Brent when needed. We will miss our student ward so much if they take it away from us. Brent has never been so close to lobbying for an assignment as he is to this one. It's going to be a sad change, but then we know that there is always a release.

In the evening one of the people that I used to Visiting Teach, Claudelle. called and invited us to come and have dessert with them. They have Grandpa Bird over on Fast Sun., when we don't do dinner for him. They called and invited us to join them for dessert. Eight people were there. They were mostly in their 70’s and 80's and they are a riot. We laughed and had a such good time with them. It’s nice to have friends of all ages.

Our life is full of good things to do (thus the extremely long and probably boring blog) and wonderful people. Aren't we blessed!!