Onwards exploring Salt Lake City and Provo

It was so brilliantly wonderful and magnificent to sleep in ( to us anyways ) and be able to attend the Salt Lake City Pioneer Day Parade!  The city was just bustling with a fun energy.  We expected the traffic to the square and were delighted to find parking so easily.  It was a very warm day already by 9am so we tried to find a shady spot to enjoy the parade.  It was very hard to find but we managed to watch the beginning of the parade for about a half hour or more in the sunshine before our sweet five year old begged for shade again.  Thankfully we were obviously near lots of tall buildings that were still casting their shadows so all we really had to do was move back a ways.

I loved the creativity and colors of all of the floats that attended.  You could feel the excitement of the marching bands getting ready to perform and also performing.

After about an hour or more our five year old, Catie, decided she was thirsty, and hungry and bored so we worked our way across the street back near the beginning of the parade seeing if that would at least help the boredom.  Very clever parade to keep the horses and wagons on the opposite side some of them spooked really easily my favorite was a dancing horse that started dancing as soon as one of the marching bands began to play.

It was shortly after this that a horse drawn wagon with two occupants drove their way up to where we were standing and our youngest in her excitement was waving at the horses and horse riders going by.  The man driving the team noticed our eldest daughter's shirt that said St Louis on it and asked if that's where we were from and mentioned that his nephew was just about to leave the MTC to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the St Louis area.  Small world.

Again our miss Catie reminded us she was hot, hungry, thirsty, and bored so we made our way across the street for some soft serve to cool down and some steps to rest on in the shade and although we had now migrated to where most floats and bands were waiting to make it to the starting line it allowed us to visit with some and take pictures.  One of our favorite floats was for family history where each corner of the float had a computer with a large computer screen showing individuals doing family history work online.  Then out would pop an ancestor to shake their hand from the screen it was adorable!

After we had finished our soft serves we made our way over to see the Salt Lake City Temple.

The visitor's center, the tabernacle, basically temple square in Salt Lake City.  Since it was Pioneer Day it was considerably busy.  At the end of touring and on our way to Provo to let the teenagers check out BYU campus where Dad once attended, we bumped into two very interesting individuals.  A sister missionary from Cardston, Alberta ( where we were headed after our SLC visit) who was speaking to an elderly gentleman who served a mission in Pretoria, South Africa ( where my husband grew up).  What a small and amazing world we live in.

We finally managed to make our way to Provo and almost didn't recognize the drive there from Salt Lake!  Everything had grown so much and looked so different it was extraordinary to see how much everything had changed.  Even the BYU campus was hard to navigate at first as it in itself has changed alot over the years but we managed.  Dad had the opportunity to show his children places he had lived, experiences with roomates, where some of his classes were and stories of his teachers.  It was a great experience for our family.

We then headed to another significant event for our family.  We went to a pot luck dinner in the park in Provo with returned missionaries who had served in our ward back home and were now home or attending BYU.  It had been the first time for some of them who had all served in the area together to see each other and our first time seeing all of them since they had fulfilled their missions and returned home to continue on with their exciting lives.  It was a rare and happy time for all of us.  I miss them already.