Blundering In Besançon: Utah

June 10-14

Since Jenae was getting married on the 12th, I took a few days vacation to see the family as well. We got good rates on my flight (around a grand) and even better than that—it was nonstop. So I zipped in to Salt Lake, and tried to avoid the jet lag by fasting before and during the flight. After just having flown over Norway, and having seen the Alps not long before that, it was really interesting to see the Rockies. It’s clear this city is not European—look how even the downtown area homes have yards, open space between them, and except for office buildings—it looks like everything is only one or two stories high. Contrast this with downtown Besancon, a much smaller city than Salt Lake, and the average building is 6 stories high. The last photo (with Griffin in it) is Besancon.

Jenae and Mom came to pick me up at the airport—and then I stopped by Jenae and Shane’s house to help set up some of their furniture—they were just finishing moving into Shane’s house. Then I spent the night at Mark’s house (shown below).

The next morning Mark and I rose early (well, I gave up trying to sleep around 3am due to jet lag, but that I thought was pretty good), and headed off for a hike up the Bell Canyon Trail. He said it was probably a 2-hour hike up…

I’ve heard that before—I remember a 2-hour hike Rebecca and I did with Mom and Dave a few years ago—by the end they were running circles around us and we could barely walk at all. This time, though, both Mark and I were in good shape and we breezed up the trail in 1 hour. It was beautiful, and we didn’t see any other hikers until the way down (there were some campers just waking up). I really enjoyed the hike—and it was fun to go with someone who can keep a quick pace. Mark even ran down some of the mountain on the way back!

Views

Terrain

Flowers

Back at Mark’s house, we got a couple shots of his animals,

and headed over to the Peterson house for a pre-wedding dinner (see their wild roses, the party, and their deck+garden).

The next morning, it was crunch time for the wedding. Lots of family members worked on gathering chairs, tables, setting up the yard, and so on. The wedding will be another blog post, but here’s a behind-the scenes glimpse of some of the setup.