Vacation Mode

First of all: my house is kind of hard to find, AND I have extremely vigilant and helpful and kind neighbors who live directly upstairs from me and ALSO have insomnia, so it's actually fine that I'm posting about vacation while still being on vacation. 

Which actually means visiting friends and family, and doing a few vacation-ey things on the side. When I visited New Zealand in 2022, many people whom I talked to about it expressed amazement and admiration at my world-traveler status, but a) I was using my mother's frequent flyer miles (and other resources), so it wasn't like it was a great accomplishment on my part, and b) I go where the family is. If I had a nephew getting baptized in Brazil, the chances of my going to Brazil would rise dramatically. As long as I have no family members there, the chances of my going there are basically zero.

Anyway. This week I've been in Idaho, a state where my father and all four of my sisters were born, and where I was raised until the age of nine. Ironically enough, the friend I'm staying with at the moment isn't from Idaho at all; I know her from being roommates with her in Provo, when we were both at BYU.

But you were here for the photographs, yes? I love taking walks in the early morning, and I LOVE that in this day and age I have a phone that is also a camera, and I don't have to remember to bring one along or to change its batteries or to download photographs, let alone keeping track of film and taking it in to get it developed. If I am a not-terrible amateur photographer, it's largely because the age I live in has provided me with the tools to get in practice and the perspective to realize how valuable those tools are. Well, and a father who talked to me about basic elements of photography when I was very young, but who most of all was so excited about it himself that that enthusiasm was contagious.

Photographs. Here we are.

While I was visiting Aunt, Uncle, and Cousins in Central Utah the youngest cousin in that family "stole" me for a couple of nights, and I was delighted to be stolen. I got both the horses picture and the extra-bright clouds above trees at sunrise picture during my early-morning walks from her house.

The weather and the nature and the everything-- this was just such a beautiful place to visit.

The friend I'm staying with in Idaho strongarmed me into going to Grand Teton National Park with her. She and her husband have a National Parks Pass. The truth is that I wasn't feeling great and kind of didn't want to go, but the truth also is that leaving the house almost never sounds good to me, and I'm often glad after the fact that I did. My personal policy is that I go, if I possibly can, when someone invites me. In this case, I was absolutely happy with my decision to go. (I was also happy that they let me call the back seat on the way home, for sleeping purposes.) I took the above picture from the front seat of the car, on the way in.

My friend's husband drove us to the lake we swam in, and then he drove to park the car, hiked in to the lake, swam for a bit, and then the three of us changed back into hiking clothes and walked back to the car. It was on this hike that I discovered that the smell of dry grass in air with close to zero percent humidity makes me nostalgic for the summer hikes of my teenage years. I took this picture as we were more than half way to the car, looking back at the mountains we were hiking away from. I used panorama mode, and I have to say, I like the results.

This last one is another awesome sunrise, but this one in Southeast Idaho. Now that I have not lived here for more than thirty years, I can absolutely see how others find the state to be beautiful; I do, too. Not that I want to move back, you understand. But it is spectacularly beautiful.

And I don't feel bad for not appreciating it as a child; after all, I was a child then! My personal conclusion is that variety is the spice of life. Also if you want your kid to appreciate landscapes other than green, full-of-trees ones, maybe do something other than reading Lord of the Rings out loud to them four times when they are growing up. Not that I mind, you understand. But that's my best guess for why the landscape didn't strike me as so beautiful when I was a kid.