Our trip to Utah

On Thursday 16 September we took our first out of state trip in over three years.  Up until now, Melba's health concerns had kept us pretty much anchored to home.  With her improvements, we decided to take some "test trips" to gauge how she held up. The first outing was the day trip to the coast in August.  That went well so we booked ourselves on Delta and ventured forth with courage and not a little trepidation and lots of prayer.  Bottom line: we thoroughly enjoyed our five days in Utah and although she tired easily and had to pace herself, Melba did quite well--enough so that we're now considering going to Arizona in November to see Mike and Aaron and their families.

Quick summary of our Utah activities:

--On our way from the Salt Lake City airport to our family at Orem we dropped by to visit with our friends, Jack and Gerry Lewis, in Alpine.  We always enjoy these sweet people who, although several years our senior, always feel like kindred spirits

--We bunked at Melba's brother and sister-in-law's (Larry and Antoinette Morgan) home in Orem.  They are so generous to give us the entire basement area all to ourselves complete with TV, bed, pool table, air hockey, and bathroom

--Friday evening Melba's brother, John and his wife, Sharon, drove down from Bountiful and all six of us enjoyed dinner at Olive Garden

--Saturday evening we dined (again at Olive Garden) with several friends I grew up with in Visalia viz. Linda (Tomlinson) Ramsey, Susan (Russell) and Gerry Cranford, Kay (Santos) and Eldon Tanner, John Reynolds, Mary (Welch) and Eldon Knight, and Naomia Bell.  It was a delight and loads of fun to be with these dear friends and get caught up on their lives

--Made the obligatory runs to Deseret Book and the LDS Distribution Center; strange as it might seem we actually purchased very little this time.  In years past, we needed an extra suitcase just to bring back all the books, DVDs, and CDs we purchased.

--The only downside was when we picked our car up at Master Park in Seattle it had a screw in the tire so we spent an hour and a half at Les Schwab getting it fixed.  On the upside, they didn't charge us anything.

In sum, a successful trip...now on to Arizona!