Grandma Evans' 80th Birthday

My Grandma turns 80 years old today, November 23. My Aunt Laura planned a surprise birthday party for her this last weekend down in Arizona so we drove down for it. We left Thursday afternoon right after I picked up the kids from school. We drove down to Draper to pick up Jonathan from work and as soon as I pulled up to his office building Ryan threw up all over. Great start to the trip!! But it must of just been car sickness because he ended up being totally fine the rest of the trip. We stayed in Kanab on Thursday night. We arrived at our hotel in Mesa, AZ around 2 in the afternoon and the kids went swimming. Friday night was the surprise party. The first part of the surprise is that all of the family was at my Grandma's favorite restaurant, Charleston's. Laura brought her there with the excuse of it being a going away dinner before Laura left to go home, yet when my Grandma arrived, there we all were.


The surprises weren't over yet, because after dinner when Laura took my grandma home there were friends and neighbors at her house waiting to surprise her with a party. Benjamin was in heaven being able to play with my grandma's dog, Precious. It was a fun night.


On Saturday we spent much of the day at a really nice park with everyone, feeding the ducks, playing whiffle ball and riding the train they had there that went around the park. Then we went back to the hotel for some more swimming and finished off the evening at my Uncle Jon's house playing games. It was a fun trip, and great to visit with so much family, even if it was a short trip.

We left Sunday morning to drive home. I have to say that Arizona is much more beautiful than I've ever given it credit for! The same can not be said about Nevada. There is pretty much nothing redeeming in the state and we should just get rid of it all together because it would make road trips shorter. We made real good time until after Cedar City when we ended up in a big snow storm. We followed a big truck going very slow to Beaver only to be forced of the freeway because it was closed. The bad weather had caused several bad accidents in the pass north of Beaver. We sat at a McDonald's in Beaver for 3 1/2 hours. Luckily it had a Play Land, but even that wasn't enough the keep the kids happy for that long. Luckily they got the freeway open, because there was not a motel room to be had in the town. By then it had stopped snowing and the roads were pretty clear. We didn't get home till almost 1am Monday.

The End.