Mid-August at a Glance!

It's been a crazy few weeks and we're in the midst of even more craziness, but here's a glimpse at our mid-August happenings around here! 

Enjoyed the sidewalk chalk art at Alpine Days:

Picked up Charity (Ellie's roommate) and stopped at a smoothie place on the way home from the airport.  She stayed with us for a few days!

Went to a family gathering with Bobby and Buddy's families.  I hadn't seen some of my cousins in 20+ years, so it was great to see them.  It was a full house, but fun to be there.

We belatedly sung to my Nana for her 95th birthday:

Ellie, McKenzie, Charity, and Emma dropped in for a few minutes  before they headed out for a concert in Park City.  The performer was Cody Fry, which no one had really heard about, but the four girls were excited to go. 

Went to the Provo Farmer's Market on Saturday...

Went to the Alpine Days parade and other festivities.  It was a tad bit of a let-down without any kids with us.  hahaha

We've been going on lots of walks, which one day was matchy matchy: 

We've been seeing tons of deer...

And lots of raptors lately...

 

Glen flew in his boss's private plane down for some meetings in Saint George for the day...

 

 

Emma and Ellie made us a charcuterie board for our Sunday dinner... It was quite tasty!

Denali was super cute...

I like finding pictures like this in the camera roll! haha

Can't remember if I ever mentioned the sprinkler saga, but basically we found out that our water meter and our neighbor's was switched and we were paying way too much!  It's a long story of how we figured that out, that involved not watering our grass for two weeks to prove to the city that something was wrong with our meter.  We FINALLY got it figured out and our lawn is still suffering the effects. 

Thankfully, we've had a lot more rain than usual lately.  Not quite like  rainy days in the East, but periods of time that are like a good soaking rain in the East.   We are hoping that it helps bring our lawn back to life! 

Ellie has also been enjoying the rain....

This is the least of the excitement of the last few weeks, so stay tuned for lots more coming your way...eventually!

Favorite and Least Favorite

May 19: Munich was a bit of a surprise to us.   We only added it onto our itinerary because it was so much cheaper to rent a car there than in Switzerland or Italy, but we really ended up enjoying our short time there.

It's a beautiful city with interesting history, reasonable prices, and many lovely buildings.   And best of all, it seemed like such a cheerful place.   So many of the cities we visited seemed entirely peopled with unhappy citizens who were unfriendly and rarely smiled, while Munich seemed to be filled with the nicest people.  

It was pouring rain while we were there (surprise!), but we thoroughly enjoyed our walk through the center of town, including  a charming little market that sold a fun variety of food and souvenirs.

Unfortunately we didn't give ourselves as much time in Munich as I would have preferred, but it was time to move on to the rest of our journey!     First stop:   Neuschwanstein Castle!   

Actually, this first picture isn't of Neuschwanstein, but of nearby Hohenschwangau Castle, which was one of the childhood homes of King Ludwig and a big part of the inspiration for him to build Neuschwanstein where he did.   

He was a bit of a recluse and was drawn to the idyllic and beautiful setting of these lovely mountains of Bavaria.

He built Neuschwanstein high up on a hilltop to be a place for solitude and repose.  The hilltop location, however, made it difficult to build and he never saw it fully finished in his lifetime.   

The architecture is stunningly beautiful and it's so picturesque that it's actually used as a model for the Walt Disney castle.  

For as picturesque as the castle is though, it's actually quite challenging to get a good picture of it.   You can either see it from far away....

Or from right up close...

It's quite a trek to get up the hill to the castle from the parking areas, but our kids are troupers and have finally reached a point in their development that they do not complain about long walks anymore!  Hallelujah!

Thankfully we had a bunch of umbrellas that we had procured during our rainy day in Rome!

And there were some hot pretzels to give us a little energy for the long wet walk down!

It ended up being one of our favorite stops of the whole trip, which was good, because after our visit there, we were off to one of our least favorite stops of our whole trip.

Lucerne, Switzerland.  

I thought I'd done my due diligence and picked a great city to stop in, but, alas, it lacked personality, was grossly expensive, wasn't all that pretty (the city itself), and the people were among the unfriendliest we met on our whole trip.   The best part about Lucerne was the scenic drive in and out of the city.

That is why I don't have a single picture of Lucerne and would not recommend it to someone planning their own trip to Europe.

Stay tuned for more European adventures to come!

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Rain, Rain, Rain

February 3:  Today it rained and rained and rained all day long.  


So I skipped my normal walk while the kids were at music lessons and read a book instead.

For some reason the heavy rain fascinated me while I was driving and I had Emma do a time lapse video on part of our drive from the kids' math classes.     

It looks like I was going about 1,000 mph, which oddly is about how quickly I feel life is going most of the time.

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