The Road Home, Interspersed With Some Sight-Seeing

We had such a wonderful time visiting the extended Nash family this June. I love my family and am always grateful for an opportunity to spend time with them. It is great to see our family grow and change, and to catch up with everyone. But since all good things must come to an end, so too did our fun family reunion. We Barretts had to start the long drive home on Saturday the 15th. It was time to say goodbye.

 

Jocelyn & Paul Carlin, our hosts, were extremely generous and patient with our needs, as well as our comings and going. Besides that, they were just fun to hang out with. I love my sister and am so grateful for her kindness, her awesome cooking and braiding skills, her sharp wit, and her good advice. We used to talk on the phone frequently, for long hours! Nowadays our lives are a lot busier, and we don't have as much time to talk. But I always love each and every opportunity.

Ray and his wife Adrienne would stay in UT for one more day, but would spend the day in Salt Lake City visiting assorted friends & family. It is so hard to get together with my brother, since he is living across the country from us (he's in Connecticut, and working for GE). All our moments with him are good ones, and it has been fun to get to know his sweet little girls a little bit better. Nathan, in particular, was able to bond with Caroline on this trip, and he was proud of being let into her "circle" (in the past, Caroline has been shy, but she really opened up on this trip and we were able to see the fun, goofy girl her parents know & love).

I regret not being able to spend as much time with Adrienne this trip, but it's because she was so busy taking care of her two little girls, and also because she was very pregnant (she's due sometime in July!). There were many nights where she would stay behind in the hotel with the girls, while Ray came over to visit with us, and that always made me feel a little guilty. She was nothing but patient, sweet and understanding the whole time, though. I really hope that the next time our family gets together, we can spend a little more time with everyone...and that I can cuddle with their cute new baby girl. Caroline has declared the new baby's name will be "Shipoopi" (from The Music Man). I can't wait to see if they make good on that promise!

 

It was especially hard for Lorelai to say goodbye. She cried silently in the car for the first hour as we drove away! Celeste and Aurora were teary-eyed as well. Nathan and I decided to break up our drive with some sight-seeing on the way back home, and we hoped that would lift their spirits.

Our first stop was Cove Fort, an old way-station for the early Mormon pioneers. It was commanded by former LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley's grandfather, Ira Hinckley. Nowadays, it's an official LDS Church historical site, located just a mile or so off Interstate 15 near Beaver, Utah. We'd often seen the sign advertising Cove Fort on our drives in and out of Utah; this time, our curiosity was sufficiently piqued. We decided to take an extra hour or so and check it out. Here's what we found:

Family kitchen for the Hinckleys

The communications room with a telegraph that kept typing out "welcome to Cove Fort"

The main kitchen of the fort

The root cellar trapdoor...in the boys' bedroom!

There was a large garden behind the fort, growing produce for all the fort's "residents"

Longer shot of the garden

These trees are as old as the fort itself; they're being held up with wooden struts

Mother's residence

 

Young daughter's quarters, complete with spinning wheel

Heading upstairs to the outer wall of the fort

Rockin' my new BYU shirt atop Cove Fort

Checking out the view from atop the wall

At the end of the tour, each girl got this gift...a small wooden "top" that can be kept spinning indefinitely if the strings are wound tightly enough. It took me a few tries to get right (and the girls never quite figured it out), but the effect can be pretty hypnotic after a while.

In conclusion: a surprisingly detailed and thoughtfully maintained fort, definitely worth a short visit. It paints a vivid picture of early frontier life. It might be a nice place for a picnic lunch, too, as we saw several tables outside the fort presumably for that purpose.

After a few more hours of driving, we arrived safely in hot, hot Las Vegas. Ugh. Luckily, we weren't staying on the Strip again, so we felt a little less weighed down by corruption and vice. We'd opted for a hotel in nearby Henderson...and this hotel actually had a separate sleeping area and a mini-kitchen! Pretty roomy; too bad we only needed it for one night. After a quick swim in the pool to cool off, we went to Sam's Town to have a buffet dinner.

The "nature wall" inside Sam's Town...about as authentic as the "nature" in Splash Mountain

We should really not go to buffets with small children! They get up and down a million times, then don't eat most of what you give them. It's probably not worth the money we spend at this point. Oh well, as buffets go it was not terribly expensive, and Nathan and I were mostly satisfied. We slept pretty well that night!

The next morning, June 16th, was Father's Day...and of course, we were on the road and couldn't celebrate it properly. Our hotel offered a discount at The Omelet House, a breakfast joint across the street, so we decided to at least give Nathan a nice breakfast before the drive back to Sahuarita.

HOLY COW. I am not usually an omelet person, but I inhaled my meal. It was stuffed with pork green chili and jack cheese. And this is the mini omelet, too! I also got a side of homemade pumpkin nut bread that was so rich it tasted like cake. The homemade potato chips (the perfect balance of crispy and chewy) was the icing on the breakfast cake.

Nathan ordered a lobster omelet (there were seriously thirty-plus different types of omelet available). He ate like a king, and we declared it a Father's Day well observed!

On the way out of Vegas, we decided to linger around the Hoover Dam. On the way north, we'd crossed over the gigantic new O'Callaghan-Tillman Memorial Bridge that bypasses the dam. We've watched its construction for years, and finally it was complete! My instinctive fear of great heights has caused me to be terrified of that bridge; thankfully, it has high walls, so I couldn't look down while we were driving over it. On the way back, we went up a small pedestrian walkway to get a more up-close look at the bridge, and the history and mechanics behind its construction.

Here's what it looks like from below...yikes!

Nathan and the girls walked a little ways out on the bridge; I made it several meters before my legs started shaking and a mild panic attack set in. Yes, I am a huge wimp when it comes to heights!! Thankfully we all survived the ordeal.

One of the deep overflow spillways...kind of freaky walking over it!

We decided to walk across the dam as well; the girls mostly enjoyed this, but it was not a universally loved idea, mostly because it was another freaking hot day. We had to walk the long distance across the dam and back, with a couple of potty breaks thrown in.

After our trudge across the hot dam, I had the bright idea of driving across the dam, only to have to turn around once I hit the Arizona side because there was no outlet to the freeway from the Arizona side of the dam any more. Oops! Suffice it to say, there was a lot of crossing back & forth and getting lost and hot and grumpy, and we're not visiting the dam again until it's a lot cooler and we have more time to linger.

After our adventure at the dam, nothing was left to do but head home. It wasn't the most exciting of drives, but it was blessedly safe and free from drama. Despite lengthening our journey, it was fun to go a little off-path and explore some new sights on our journey home. We might try doing more tangents like that in the future! Now our journeys for the year are done. Well, not Nathan...he's got a big trip to Washington DC coming up in the fall! As for the rest of us, it's time to see what the rest of summer will bring.