How we spent our summer vacation -- Summer Recap 2012

I know we're already a month into the new school year, but I just realized that I failed to do my "How I spent my summer vacation" report. Time to catch up and give a recap of fun family activities over the summer months. :-)


We actually did our Big family vacation at the end of March and early April when we went to Disneyland. I already gave a recap of that trip so I won't review that here. Because we did our big trip already, we didn't make any big vacation excursions over the summer months, but we did find a number of ways to have fun.

Be warned...this is a photo heavy post that will eat up your bandwidth and hopefully make you smile.  :)

Just before the school year ended, we took the family to the Renaisance Festival up in Ogden. Once again we had a fun filled time wandering the area with knights, knaves, ladies and fools.

At Valley View, the 6th grade end of year tradition is a field trip to La Caille for an elegant multi-course French dinner. I got to go with him and we had fun dressing up, wandering the lovely estate watching the peacocks and other animals and then eating some tasty French food. All of the kids (and some adults) were dreading the escargot…but everybody seemed to manage to eat the snails down without too much fuss.

We made a couple of trips to the zoo to see the animals and Cherry Hill for mini-golf.  We partied with family, hung out at parks and went to Arts Festivals.

In June, the girls went down to Manti for the dedication of some new gardens around the Temple. One of my wife's friends spearheaded the project so she went down to support her.

Also in June was the week long scout camp. They went to a BSA organized camp this year and they had a lot of fun shooting, rowing, camping and just messing around with the other boys.

For Independence Day, church young men groups up and down the Wasatch Front organized an "Army of Heleman" march as part of the parade. Thousands of boys between ~12 and 20 dressed up in Nephite garb, held a tall staff and marched along the parade route occasionally stopping to shoot inspirational messages. It was a pretty cool sight to see.

Naturally July was also filled with some fun fireworks. All of the kids really got into lighting the fireworks this year. Even though "arial" fireworks were legal again this year, we still didn't get any. Just a few blocks east of us, they actually had a "no fireworks" rule because it's been so dry. If you watched the news, you know that this has been a bad summer for wildfires all over.

In addition to fireworks and parades, we hit the carnival at the park, did some swimming up at Crystal Hot Springs and had a barbecue.

We made a trip to Lagoon for our stake Lagoon Day and took our annual old-timey family photo.

August marked a number of family reunions and other family get togethers.

We made a trip to the county fair one night for some carnival food, games and rides. They had a mechanical bull and everybody gave it a try. (Some people got two tries because they fell off too quick the first time).

We also took trips to the Museum of Natural History and up to Brigham City to see the Temple open House.

As summer wound down we turned back-to-school shopping into family activities and had fun playing in the fun stores at the malls.

And even though it happened after school had already started, I'll throw in a couple of pictures from our annual stake luau complete with lots of great food, dancing and entertainment.

 Phew…that's the whirlwind tour of the some of the bigger (or at least photographed) activities of our summer. And I finished my report before the first snow fell in the valley (though there was snow in the mountains last weekend).

School is back in session.



Happy fall. :-)