Park City Part 1

Around the last weekend in June Taylor said, "Hey do you want to go to Park City in the next couple weeks?" 

And I (surprisingly) answered, "Sure, let's do it."

Now, we go to Utah a lot (at least a couple times a year) and because we go there so frequently I'm normally pretty against traveling to Utah with kids outside of family events/gatherings. Plus traveling as a mom is just stressful. I have to make packing lists, do laundry, make sure we have snacks, bedding, bottles and other necessities for bedtime, diapers and wipes that will last long enough for the trip (but not so many that they take up the whole car), books and toys for the kids (the right ones so they'll actually play with/read and won't lose their minds over me not bringing the toy that they actually wanted instead of the one they told me they wanted), medicine/first aid, swimsuits, towels, sunblock, swim diapers, life jackets, swim shoes, hiking shoes, church shoes, and not to mention clothes and toiletries for myself and 3 kids. 

(And my camera. I probably triple check for that every trip.)

Taylor's job is to pack his own clothes (yep, he's on his own), pack everything into the car (I've had to do it maybe once and I hated it because I was terrible at it), and make sure I stay relatively sane by reminding me (frequently) that the kids will probably just want to wear the same clothes the whole time anyway and if we forget anything we can just buy it there because believe it or not they have stores there too. 

Taylor also ALWAYS drives which basically makes him a saint. 

So it was really surprising for both of us that I said yes to this spur-of-the-moment trip to Utah.

But I could tell Taylor wanted to go really, really badly. We may live in California but his heart and soul is in the mountains. He loves the cooler temperatures, the beauty, mountain biking, fishing, sleeping in a cabin with antlers and deer heads and pictures of bears on the walls, growing a beard and wearing flannel shirts. So I agreed and off to the Utah mountains we went.

It worked out pretty perfectly that one of my friends was having a wedding reception up in Alpine one weekend and one of Taylor's friends was getting sealed in the temple and my cousin's fiancée was having a bridal shower the following weekend. We decided to stay for about a week and go to everything!

We spent the first part of the week at Deer Valley. We hiked, did the Alpine slide, and shopped. Taylor mountain biked, golfed, and took the kids fishing. I got to take lots of pictures in the beautiful mountains with beautiful light of my beautiful kids and I ran or hiked almost every day. The kids loved where we stayed (foosball table for the win) and we even got to have my sister and some of her kids come play and celebrate Luke's first birthday.

The end of the week we spent in a condo with access to a pool so we also got to swim everyday and work on Will's swimming skills (yay for finally putting him in swim lessons this summer!). Will was super upset when the new place didn't have a foosball table but he eventually got over it (after we got home and a few weeks passed and he stopped mentioning it...) Taylor and I relived the glory days of no kids and played Settlers of Catan against each other every night after the kids went to bed (I know, we're super cool) and it just ended up being a really great trip.

My faith in traveling to Utah has been restored! (as long as we go up in the mountains for part of it). :)

And as I said, I took lots of pictures...  but I broke it up into a few posts.

(singing at the top of her lungs)