Hawaii!

Arthur and I recently returned from an awesome trip to the island of Oahu. Arthur was attending a Radiation Effects conference for work there, and I got to tag along. My parents watched the kids for us while we went on this virtually free trip! (Thanks soooo much, Mom and Dad!) We stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, a super nice resort on Waikiki beach. We went snorkeling at Hanauma Bay and Shark's Cove, saw a huge rainbow arcing over the entire sky (the picture does NOT do it justice), attended a luau at Paradise Cove (good but not quite as good as the Polynesian Cultural Center), toured the Iolani Royal Palace and paid a visit to the Arizona Memorial which was sobering.

While Arthur was in conference sessions, I went on walks and window shopped a little bit. But mostly I sat out by the pool reading Harry Potter #7! (You'd be surprised how many Harry Potter books I saw in people's hands on this trip. No wonder J.K. Rowling is a billionaire.) It was such a treat to just be a couple again and relax.


The only sad thing was that our camera drowned and as a result, we don't have any good pictures from this trip because we were using a disposable camera. So just believe that our trip was a lot better than the pictures look.


Here are a couple of pictures for those of you with dial-up. (I know from experience that those photo montages take a really long time to download, so you can look at the abbreviated version.) Meanwhile if you do have high speed internet, you can see the pictures complete with some mood music by Israel Kamakaiwo'ole.

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Happy Independence Day!

We sure are grateful for the freedoms and liberties we enjoy in this country. Happy 4th of July!

It's about time!

I'm finally getting some new pictures up. Yahoo for me! I'm trying to catch up, so the post dates will be dated to reflect when the events took place. So scroll on down and you will be pleasantly surprised to find something different than Arthur and I smiling at you from Bandelier National Monument. I'm trying to get this all updated before we leave on another vacation, and have even more to post, so hopefully there will be lots of new stuff in the next couple of weeks.

Packard Family Reunion

We spent the last week of June up in Washington State for the 2007 Packard Family Reunion--(Sharee's mother's family.) We had quite an adventure actually getting there. Our car was misbehaving the whole way until finally in the middle of Utah, the engine died. The kids were great about it and we had a "fun adventure" getting towed through the Spanish Fork Canyon. Aunt Melody and Uncle Carl were awesome to take us in as they were preparing to leave for the reunion also. We borrowed Grandma and Grandpa Packard's car (thank you!) to drive the rest of the way to the reunion. I wish I could say that we arrived there without further incident, but a deer jumped out of nowhere in Montana and hit that little black car! (Yes, we were wondering if anything else could possibly go wrong.) But that car got us the rest of the way, and we had a great time. We also had a fun time visiting Jenny & Brandon, and Julianne and Melanie up in Rexburg on the way up. Here are a few of the pictures from all the festivities.

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For those of you who actually check our blogspot from time to time, I know you are probably getting sick of seeing the Bandelier National Monument blog pop up. I have been awful at keeping this thing updated. But I have great plans to update it soon despite our recent downgrade to dial-up internet (a change which has drastically decreased my time on the computer for better or for worse.) Anyway, I'll post again soon. Don't give up on us!

A-Camping We Will Go!

We went camping the Friday and Saturday before Father's Day up at Jack's Creek. It was beautiful! We pitched our tent in this green meadow surrounded by pines and aspens, and wild irises! (I didn't even know irises grew in the wild!) Arthur and Dallin brought their new fishing poles and we found a little pond for them to fish in. Even though the fish weren't biting, they still had fun casting their lines out over and over and over again. Our friends The Schmutz's and the Halls met us up there Friday night and we sang songs around the campfire, and looked through Arthur's telescope, and went on a hike to the creek the next day where Daphne discovered a nice mudhole. Sean was so tired that he didn't have any fun at all, and fell asleep on a camping chair while we were striking camp. Poor little guy. I guess we just played too hard.

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