4th of July Weekend

Happy Fourth of July everyone!
Well, we are on a roll with our blog... two weekends in a row. This weekend we had a lot of fun because we had some family come into town and visit us and we wanted to share some pictures. To start off, I wanted to put in a nice picture of the flag, I took the picture at the USS Arizona Memorial and thought it would be nice for the 4th. Jodie and I watched Hotel Rwanda yesterday and have been talking about blessing we are to be born and live in a place like the US. We are all very lucky and have much to be thankful for. We hope that you all had a lot of fun this weekend to commemorate our freedoms.

Well, the start of this week, we had my sister Jenna come visit us. We picked her up at the airport and she spent the night at our house before she went to EFY. It was really fun, we had a nice BBQ with mashed potatoes (per Jenna's request). We took her to EFY on Monday and helped her check in and get all situated. Then later in the week, Jodie's parents came down to Provo to visit too; they also brought our wedding gifts from Washington. It was really nice of them and we are very appreciative of it. While they were here, we had Jodie's brother Shaun over and we had some really good cooking. Then on the 4th, we decided to go out and see some of the sights around Salt Lake. It was a lot of driving, but really fun because I hadn't been to several of them for many years and was very nostalgic.

The first thing we went to was This is the Place Monument, up emmigration canyon. This is a picture of Brigham Young's view when he said "This is the right place. Carry on."

They also had the original trail that the pioneers took marked out. So, here's a picture of Dad on the trail.
Here's a picture of Jodie running down the trail.

Another picture of the trail. But pretty impressive to see what the pioneers had to travel through get to SLC.
Here's a nice picture too.
We later went to Little Cottonwood Canyon and saw the granite quarries for the Salt Lake temple. It was really cool to see the granite rocks with the chisel marks still in them.


We also went down to the river. It was really cool to see because of all the snowmelt, the river was flowing pretty good.

Here's another picture of the granite.
On the way back, we stopped off at Cabela's. We saw something kind of cool at the aquarium. This fish was resting on a post. It was kind of funny.
Later that night, we met up with Grandpa Maxwell at one of the restaurants in the Little America Hotel in SLC and had dinner. It was really fun to met up and have dinner together. After dinner, we went over to their condo and saw Grandma too. After talking for a while, we had to go back to Provo because Jodie's parents had a long drive ahead of them in the morning. Once we got back from SLC, we all had some rainbow sherbet and watched the fireworks from our front yard. It was a fun fourth of July.

On Saturday morning, Jodie's parent had to make the drive back to Washington to be there for church on Sunday. Afterwards, we went to go pick up Jenna from EFY and got to spend a little more time with her before we dropped her off at the airport. When we got back from the airport, we washed the car and then watched a movie.

Oh, on a little side note. Jodie and I got callings today. I'm going to be an Elder's Quorum instructor and a ward missonary. Jodie is going to be the co-director of the Mia Maids. We both are pretty excited about it.

Well, we hope that you all had a great 4th of July weekend.