Big Family Vacation 2025 part 4 - southern Utah

Payson - the road not taken

Saratoga Springs

Fri Aug 1 was the day of changing plans. We had, like, four different plans for what would happen before the day came. Our original was to go Friday night to the temple in Payson and stay at a new AirBNB that night. But we got everything done in the Provo area we needed to early. So then I found temple baptisms at, like, 6:30am for the kids in Saratoga Springs, so we didn’t have to stick around in Provo for the whole day. We could do baptisms and while they were doing baptisms, one of us would come back and pack the car, then return to pick up the kids and head off to Washington. Then the night before we decided that was a mess and we were all too tired. Even the teenagers were too tired!

JT: Yeah, I wasn’t too tired!

There were 1-2 other plans in there somewhere. So this is what actually happened:

We got a baptismal time around 9am or so, some reasonable hour of the day. We packed up the car all together and went to Saratoga Springs. Hy and Nia performed baptisms and then Joy and I did an endowment session. I used the temple microwave to reheat our Brick Oven pizza for lunch. We tried to do some banking at AFCU to set Hyrum up, but they have problems giving checks to people who are technically still minors. #He’sOnHisOwn

We finally made it on the road to Washington, UT, in the early afternoon, which gave us a foretaste of what driving cross-country without AC was going to be like. Also, one of the rubber/plastic thingies that attaches to the roof of the car had a meltdown. For some time, it’s been coming loose on long drives, but only a couple inches. This time, more than a foot peeled off and it started slapping the car at high frequency – fwap fwap fwap fwap fwap fwap….

Nia: While I was trying to nap! It woke me up!

Got really old really fast! So we got some duct tape and taped it down, which had to be reapplied every couple hours because it melted in the heat and peeled off too! It was during this trip that we also lost a metal Chrysler side-strip, whatever it’s called, on the driver’s door. Just last week, we lost the one on the passenger side. I’m hoping this car makes it to a full 200,000 miles, but we’re at 197,000 right now and we’re driving it pretty hard…. Anyway.

We arrived at Mike and Genevieve’s after dinner and found Aunt Swanny and Justin staying on their couches as well! Her place was out of AC too, and they wouldn’t get repair guys there until Monday. So Nia slept on couch cushions in the girls’ room while we took the hide-a-bed and the boys had air mattresses next to us.

Nia: There was an air mat on top of the cushions, Dad.

Oh good.

JT: I called their house “the fun house,” and was asking when we would go to the fun house.

Joy: Famous words. You chose wisely.

Hy: I enjoyed Mike and Genevieve’s house because they have a ping pong table and a pool, and those are always fun. Another fun thing was that the basketball hoop was lower, so I was able to dunk on it. We also played mini golf in their backyard! And cornhole. It was fun spending time with everyone and playing games.

Nia: I learned how to dive! It was SO exciting!!! [She says to tell that was way too loud, right in my ear, which it was.]

While driving around Saturday, we saw another temple out there, so drove up to it. The Red Cliffs temple is physically in Washington, but is incorporated in St. George, down the cliffs. We heard 3-4 different versions of how that happened, ranging from St. George stealing the land to Washington not wanting a temple (!) and giving the land away, but I think the more likely story is that St. George had better infrastructure to support it so they incorporated the land.

Joy and I learned the game Splendor with them (on the right, below), which we loved so much I got it for my birthday. Saturday was all in all just a fun day relaxing with family. We got to see Aunt Swanny’s place and she took us out to pizza for lunch. Sunday we went to their ward and just had a relaxing day at home – nothing too energetic, played some more games.

Hy: We played Gang of Four, a card game, with them, but it’s difficult to find anywhere. So I used my blank cards to make a copy of it that I’m now taking with me to college.

Mon Aug 4 –

We took an outing to St. George. JT had decided to stay at Mike and Gen’s place, so it was just the four of us. We visited the visitor’s center and I was surprised to learn that the St. George Temple was open. They finished its refurbishment two years ago! I missed that, somehow. I thought that if the Salt Lake refurbishment was still ongoing, then St. George must be too. Oopsies. With better planning, we could have gone in on Saturday. But the visitor’s center was nice and we saw a short film about building the St. George temple. They also have a game to see if you can identify where random temples are in the world, which is a fun geography game.

We searched the St. George cemetery and found the family plots with Grandpa Straw and his parents. The spot for Grandma Straw’s ashes is still there. We took pictures of the plot so that it will be easier to find next time. We also enjoyed a last Cold Stone and swung by Brigham Young’s winter home and the very first Relief Society building out there. We also swung by Grandma Straw's former home.

Nia wasn’t feeling well. Mike and Gen’s youngest was sick the entire time we were there, and so she hid out by herself most of the time, except at night when she spent some time with Nia. I was a little worried Nia was getting her cold, but she didn’t, thankfully.

Nia: The motion sickness I struggled with was Rough. I’m going to blame it on the altitude. It was fun talking to Sydney at night! First night we had a weird song contest, and we’d pull up weird songs on our devices and just like, who’s got the weirdest, the funniest. Sometimes I won, sometimes she did. That was fun. The second night she told me about some cool movies and stuff. Oh, I still need to watch ___ the Spider…. Arnold? Amo? Lucas! Lucas the spider! It’s so cute!!

I ordered a laptop for Hyrum to use at school while Joy visited her high school friend, Debbie. Joy: “It was really nice to spend time with Debbie and learn about the girls she adopted. She was really happy, and I was happy for her.”

That night was a big barbecue to get a few more family members in town, and we had a major pool party.

Tue Aug 5 – We packed up the last of our things and took off at 9am for Santa Rosa, NM.

Thursday the week before we had enjoyed Splash Summit, and we knew that Derrin and I had gotten sunburned. I had a really hard time sleeping at Mike and Gen’s because of my sunburns: both shoulders/upper arms were in excruciating pain, despite all the suncare cream I could slather on. Somehow, during the drive home, I developed blisters. I hadn’t had sunburn blisters since a horrendous, nightmarish month when I was in 5^th grade and these two large blisters on my shoulders bled pus for a month!

So I got really antsy. How in the world/why in the world, if the sunburn was that bad, had the blisters not developed much sooner? It might have been the hand of a kind Providence. A chat with GPT told me it might have been my diabetes saying hello, and that I should see a doctor on the soon side. I wrapped up my arms in 15 yards of gauze and gritted my teeth in our 100 degree car.

When we got to the hotel in Santa Rosa, I dropped my phone for the last time. The screen shattered. Also, our room floors had seen better days: the last tenants had turned off the fridge so it defrosted all over the entryway, and the carpet was sticky, and the AC was dripping, and there may have been one or two other problems.

Nia: The floor made your shoes sticky too! The floor was unhappy. Plus, there was no counter space in the bathroom, and I did not like that. But I did like their weight room.

The weight room gave the kids a chance to weigh themselves and see the damages we had done. We were all relieved to have gained less than we bargained for during our splurging.

Wed Aug 6 – We finished our drive home and were very happy to be back home, with AC and delicious showers. My blisters resolved themselves and no more reappeared, so I never did head to the doctor about that one. As I write this a month later, my arms have no more pain or itchiness, but they are still slightly red compared to the rest of me.

 

And that was our “3”-week trip to Utah and family!

JT: It was great.