Labor Day Bed-In

It's 10:30 a.m. on Labor Day 2010, and Steve and I are still in bed watching Dr. Oz, texting friends about going biking later on today, checking email's, facebook, and blogs. Something tells me that we are not as cool as John and Yoko.

Where in the World have YOU run?

In an effort to be efficient this morning, I combined my morning run with the errand of returning videos to Top Hat. I thought this would be a good way to force myself to run some hard hills. As I was plodding down 3100 South, I started thinking about all the cool places I have run. Here is my list so far (I will update as I remember):

Canada:

Victoria, B.C.

Washington State:

San Juan Islands (Roche Harbor)

Monroe

Bellingham

Spokane

Long Beach

Oregon:

Ontario

Portland

Cannon Beach

California:

Laguna Beach

Huntington Beach

Coronado Island/San Diego

New Mexico:

Albuquerque

Texas:

Austin

Arizona:

Lake Powell, near Glen Canyon Dam

Utah:

Logan

Hyrum

Eden

Liberty

Huntsville

Oakley

Echo

Heber Valley

Park City

Salt Lake City

Bountiful

West Bountiful

North Salt Lake

Farmington

Centerville

Kaysville

Layton

Cedar City

Central

Veyo

Saint George

Santa Clara

Colorado:

Denver

Idaho:

Driggs

Wyoming:

Just this side of Driggs

Georgia:

Savannah

Missouri:

Jamesport

Iowa:

Keokuk

Illinois:

Nauvoo

Chicago (Does running through the O'Hare airport while trying to catch a connecting flight count? Even with my pounding on the closed door while yelling, "let me in! I can see the plane, it is sitting RIGHT THERE!")

Wisconsin:

Milwaukee

Door County

Virgina:

Crystal City

Washington D.C.

Massachusetts:

Hopkinton

Ashland

Framingham

Natick

Wellesley

Newton

Brookline

Boston

Somewhere in the Carribean on a Cruise Ship

New York:

How about running from Broadway to catch the subway train back to JFK...does that count??? Dang it!

That's all I have so far. Whenever I go on a trip, I always pack my running clothes/shoes in case I have a chance to go for a quick run. I hauled my running gear on our trip to Israel, but we never had a minute go running. I DID, however, swim in some pretty cool places: the Mediterranean Sea, the Dead Sea, Jordan River, Sea of Galilee....

Last Days of FREEDOM

During the last week of summer break, Steve and I took the Young Women of our ward boating up at Pineview Reservoir. Because we have such exceptional young girls in our ward, who are all involved in good things, it has been really hard to line up a date to take them, and even then we had to adjust the timing so that we could pick up girls from cheer practice, and then get them back in time for mini cheer practice. On this day, we also had girls trying out for volleyball and a back to school night. Soooo, we couldn't stay on the lake as long as we would've liked, but we sure had fun with the time we had. We let everyone try wakeboarding who wanted to go, and it was a lot a fun to watch all of them give it a go.

The next day, Steve and I packed up our trailer and our two youngest and headed out of town to meet up with the Mordue Clan at Flaming Gorge. We went in on a trailer four years ago with some friends, and believe it or not, this was the first time we have every used it! As we took a crash coarse from Toby on how to prepare the trailer (juice up the batteries, get the fridge running, fill the water tank) and how to set it up once we got to the camp site, we were asking our selves: Why haven't we done this more often?? Poor Toby, I think we called him a biz-zillion times with questions.

Make that a biz-zillion and one times:

"Hi Toby! Hey, where are the tools kept to change a tire...oh, there ARE NO tools on the trailer? Hmmmm..."

This sweet little bonding experience happened just outside of Evenston.

Steve and I dug out the tire changing tool kit from our suburban and were doing a decent job, until we went to take the spare tire off of the back end and discovered that it had different sized bolts holding it on. And yes, you guessed it, we didn't have the right tool. Here we are, on a tiny patch of ground off the side of the freeway, with semi's whizzing past at trailer-rocking high speeds, the trailer up on a flimsy-looking jack, wheel-less, and no way to get the spare tire off to replace it. Steve had to walk a little ways off into the distance to control his colorful language and think clearly, and meanwhile I said a very plea-filled prayer. With an "amen" I looked down the road, and driving up the side was a truck with a guy in it who was hopping out at regular intervals to pick up tire pieces from off of the freeway. He was wearing an orange reflector vest and his truck had a government insignia on it: yeah for the Wyoming State Road Clean up Crew! I pointed the truck out to Steve and I told him that I bet he would stop to help us. Sure enough, the kindly gentlemen stopped and he had the tool we needed to get the spare tire off, we fixed the tire and went on our merry way!

We made it to the Gorge safely, and had a lot of fun with the Mordue's. We went wake boarding on the lake and the next day we loaded everyone up on rafts and floated the Green River.



We had so much fun getting into water battles with each other and with other boats. Ashley was on my boat, and during one of the battles I ended up with a face full of water from her bucket. I'm still wondering if that was on accident or not...

The trip home was epic in that everything that could go wrong did: parts broke, we got another flat tire, a traffic jam outside of Farmington. A 3 1/2 trip took us six hours, but we made it home safe. Now for the next big adventure: SCHOOL!