Home Again, Home Again, Days 1-2

A few hours ago we drove into our garage after being gone for nearly a week. Last Friday (I guess technically the Friday before last now as it's Sunday), Rob's grandfather passed away. It was not completely unexpected as he's been doing very poorly for a long time, but it was pretty sudden. We decided we needed to make it out to Salt Lake for the funeral. With three days before we had to leave, we frantically got everything ready to go. We found a friend to watch Simon (our dog), someone to feed the cats, and someone to pick up the mail. Rob got the time off work, we pulled the kids out of school, and I did a week and a half of school work in 3 days. Brittney's family (now living in UT) graciously offered to let us stay with them. We decided to drive as 6 plane tickets gets a bit pricey. It's a 21 hour drive from here.

The original plan was to drive 14 hours or so, leaving early afternoon and driving until late at night. We would then stop at a hotel and finish with a shorter drive the next day. Several hours into the drive, we decided to try and drive through the night. Eva was great, but hated the car. The other kids were awesome, partially due to our buying a dual screen portable dvd player. Yes, I know everyone else has had one for 10 years :)

We followed our gps as we forgot to bring a map of any state other than TX. We planned to go the Southern route as it's the middle of winter and driving through CO and WY in January/February is not on my list of fun things to do. It started getting cold faster than we thought it would (it was 73 when we left) and we started noticing snow sooner than we expected to. About the time we started seeing signs that Denver was less than 100 miles away, we finally stopped and bought a map. Sure enough, we were headed straight up through CO and through southern WY! By then it was too late to go any other way though, so we kept going. It was freezing (you know it's cold when frost forms on your windows even with the heater on in the car), but there was almost no snow at all! We made it to Brittney's house in about 20 hours, around 9am.

I don't know how we could have done this without Brittney! She was so excited to see us and the kids and immediately took the kids and sent Rob and I to bed. Jack was over the moon and Eva even remembered her! Brittney's family has a wonderful house for kids, complete with a cool closet in the basement that has the walls painted with chalkboard paint so the kids can draw on them. We got a couple hours of sleep, then Brittney offered to watch the kids so they didn't have to sit in the car for another hour, then behave at the viewing for two hours.

Rob and I drove down to the funeral home, stopping a few miles from it to pick up dinner. We just happened to end up in a booth next to Elder Scott, one of the 12 Apostles of our church, which was a very cool experience! The viewing was perfect (thank you to Amy and Patty and Amy's kids for all your hard work!!!) and we got to say good-bye to Grandpa L and spend some time with family members and friends who loved him. Rob's sister, Becca, was able to fly out (neither Kate nor Quincy were able to get the time off work) and his parents drove down as well. It was the first time we had seen Rob's dad since our trip to OR in 2008 and we haven't seen Rob's mom since she came out to help with my last residency 8 months ago. Most of the relatives we haven't seen since our last visit to UT in 2003 and some I had never met and Rob hadn't seen in decades. It was a wonderful tribute to Grandpa that so many family members were able to make it out to say good bye to him :)