Last fall we bought tickets to go to Utah over Christmas break. We haven't been home to visit either of our families at Christmas since Emily was baby, and we thought the kids would really enjoy the novelty of all the snow in Utah. Little did we know that this year we would get our own Alabama white Christmas just days before we hopped on the plane. In fact, when we arrived, we actually joked that we had left more snow behind in Madison than we found in Orem. And apparently, Mother Nature does not take kindly to jesting, or maybe she just wanted us to get our money's worth out of our 6 plane tickets, because for the next two days it snowed non-stop in Utah. So much, that we did not get to drive up to Temple Square to see the Christmas lights, which I had really wanted to do, but we did get to do a lot of other fun stuff.
The kids were fascinated by the amount of snow and ice. On New Year's Day, we drove up Provo canyon to go tubing at Soldier Hollow. They have several tubing runs, as well as a tow to pull you up the hill--which was a lot more fun than walking up! It was very cold (about 2 degrees), and there was sooo much snow! At one point Emily stepped in a deep drift and sunk up to her waist, but everyone, except Bryce, thought the fun of sliding down the hills outweighed the numb toes. (I had to take Bryce back to the lodge after about an hour of "fun" because he was complaining so much about cold fingers and toes.)
Even with the icy roads, the girls and I got in two good shopping trips. One day, Mark's mom and I took Natalie and Emily to BYU campus where we checked out the bookstore and I did my best to sell the girls on their future school. Grammy bought Emily a sweatshirt and Natalie some very nice paintbrushes and a tube of paint (which unfortunately didn't make it past airport security on the way home--the paint, not the brushes). Another day, I took the girls and two of their cousins to the Orem mall where we had a great time admiring modest fashion choices. Emily is already sold on BYU for the clothing alone. Surprisingly, Natalie, the anti-fashionista, got the most stuff--including some cute blue Banana Republic flats that we found at DI while looking for 2nd-hand snow gear.
When we weren't shopping, or visiting, or playing in the snow, we were eating. We had so much good food! We had Litza's pizza (a Petrucka family favorite) twice. We stuffed ourselves at Tucanos, where Emily and her cousin Mary actually sampled the chicken hearts. Grammy and Pop-pop cooked Mark one of his all time favorite Sunday dinners--pork roast with roasted potatoes--which Bryce proclaimed to be even better than his previous favorite, his mommy's schnitzl. (It's ok, I'm not too traumatized) And we were also able to participate in the annual Petrucka family Polish feast, which they kindly moved from Christmas Eve to New Year's Eve just for us.
All in all it was a great vacation. What better way to ring in the new year than with family.
1 comment:
I thought the pizza link was going to be Mark's mom's pizza recipe. I lost it a while back. We haven't been out west since we left it. And we probably won't get back out there until Catherine goes to school. She plans on going to BYU. We will see what happens!
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