We Are Your Christmas Vacation Nightmare

Yup. We got us one a them recreational vehicles so we can serprize you fer vacations by pulling our house up to your driveway and emptying our sewage down yer gutters. It'll be loads of fun!

Just kidding. We would never trash your gutters like that. We'd make sure to hose it down after.

So here's the load-down: Every summer, the Church sends Dave (and we go with him) on these month-plus-long trips to places like Arizona, New York, Nauvoo, etc. to run the sound for pageants. When we go to Nauvoo, we're gone for about 7 weeks. It's really hard staying in a condo in the middle of nowhere, trapped inside by the relentless sun and no trees, and never getting to see Dave because the pageant site is way too far away from our condo. When we did the Hill Cumorah Pageant, we rented an RV and stayed right there on the hill at Zion's Camp. It was the most fun we've had at a pageant because we were so close the entire time. We could, and did, walk over and spend time with Dave most the day. And we were just a few skips away from the trailer so that made it easy for nap times. The difference between staying right by the pageant site and a few miles away from it is the difference of having a wonderful, bonding family experience to being miserable, lonely, and bored out of our minds. So Dave worked it out with the "higher-ups" at work so that the money they spend on our condo rent, will instead be paid to us for the RV we just bought. They'll pay less than what they did for our condo or apartment stays, but once added up for all the pageants we do, it will more than cover our RV payments. So we're really excited about this.

We just got the RV last Friday, and took it on a "break-it-in" trip to see my sister, Camille, and her husband and baby up in Idaho for the weekend. We knew the first trip would be hard because the girls need to get used to sleeping in a new place, and there would be many things we need to figure out for a smooth RV trip. For instance, not depending Solely on our Tom-Tom to find the RV park at 1:00 in the morning. We looked for an hour and could not find that park. The Tom-Tom kept wanting us to exit the freeway where no exits existed. We finally ended up in the parking lot on BYU-I's campus. At first we were going to park it in a Church's parking lot, but then remembered that Church was the next morning and people would be everywhere. So we wake up the next morning, surrounded by the sounds of cars and people everywhere. Turns out Campus is more populated by Church-go-ers than the church houses are. Can we say AWKWARD! And talk about fulfilling our Christmas Vacation image. We later discovered that a frontage road that we couldn't see in the dark, leads to the RV park, the entrance to which was directly at the spot of where the Tom-tom tried to get us to leave the freeway, mid entrances. I guess there has been a lot of construction and our Tom-tom still knew where the RV park was, but didn't know how to get us there.

Other than that, and not sleeping at nights because we have to get Rory used to sleeping in a different bed, the trip was really fun. Getting to see Camille, John and their baby, Spencer was a blast. We even got to spend some time with James' girlfriend, Lee-Ann. She is so awesome! I really like her a lot.