Orem, UT

Dear Friends:

This week, I'm in Utah to attend my wife's family reunion.  The actual reunion will take place in Bear Lake, Idaho.  I arrived a couple of days early and spent most of the time in Orem and Provo.  These images come from the time I spent there.

I absolutely love visiting this part of the country, for many reasons.  One of those is the mountains.  This particular mountain is my absolute favorite - Mount Timpanogos.  It's beautiful in any season.  Those that live here are lucky to be able to see it at all times:

We stayed with my wife's folks while in town.  They have some blackberry bushes in their backyard and the fruit produced here is enormous.  Yum-yum:

The per capita consumption of soda in Utah is among the highest in the country.  Most of this can be attributed to the low consumption of coffee and tea by citizens of the state.  Recently, several "specialty" soda shops have opened, providing an array of flavors to add to any soda.  The most popular is called Sodalicious:

It's quite unique.  The business operates from a single room - the back of a barber shop.  However, they have a drive-through that is busy most of the time:

The business model is based on volume, as the pricing is very, very reasonable.  The number of flavors and flavor-combinations is staggering.  This is just one of the menus (you'll need to click to enlarge):

It's just a fun place to frequent.  In fact, the CEO of Pepsi visiting recently, because he wanted to see a place that moves that much Mt. Dew, for himself ; )

One of our favorite restaurants is Cubby's in Provo.  It specializes in tri-tip sandwiches and salads.  I love, love the salads (sorry for the poor picture).  Mine had a lemon cilantro vinagrette dressing...simply delicious!

My nephew, Super Kimmy and little L at Cubby's

With all the cousins in town for the reunion, we took them to one of the latest attractions in Utah County - the Museum of Natural Curiosity.  This is a fantastic children's museum with tons and tons and tons of imaginative exhibits.  This is a crazy picture of the "rainforest" area, with rope bridges suspended 20-30 feet in the air:

I spent most of my time chasing L through these rope bridges...which I didn't mind at all.  Talk about a great workout:

Kidopolis - with tons of make-believe businesses where kids could play in banks, pet stores, theaters, dance studios, laundry and more...

Yet another section of this $28M facility is a giant water area.  Kids can play with water, construct water pipes, see how the flow changes with gravity and even how objects can be suspended with water.  The entire area has a drainage system that lets the kids really have fun.  All of the kids we took had a BLAST.

They had a special water table for babies, so that they could play in very shallow water.  Genius!

In yet another section - this time outdoors - they had a little zip line that kids could use.  We got to the museum when they opened, so there wasn't a huge line outside:

After the museum, I took G-Man on a special trip.  He's become really interested in Scouting and especially all of the patches on the Scout uniforms.  At Philmont Scout Ranch, G-Man decided to start a patch collection.  While in Utah County, I decided to take him to the local council Scout shop.  It's the largest in the entire country.  For me, it was like a trip to Disneyland, for G-Man, it was a great introduction to other Scout patches:

That evening, we decided to go visit the local food trailer scene in Orem.  Each Friday, over 15 of the local food trucks gather in a giant parking lot, to offer a variety of food to locals.  In Austin, we get to experience this all the time - it's fun to watch people here have similar fun:

We got there just as they were opening...

I'm quite partial to hot dogs...and that includes corn dogs.  I made an obvious choice, when I saw this truck:

I'm happy to report that the corn dogs were not only enormous, but delicious.  The chef found out I was from Austin and wanted to make something a little different.  He decorated the corn dog with ketchup and dripped honey on top of it.  I was skeptical, but tried it.  It was awesome....

Now that is a cool pizza truck... Fiore Wood Fire Pizza

One of my wife's students from back in junior high, started one of these trucks with her husband and friend.  It's called Savour and features gourmet sliders.  They were delicious:

For dessert, G-Man wanted to try some shaved ice.  They had three different trucks offering the sweet treat, but we liked the people from Hawaii.  This, my friends, was a small.  It's as big as G-Man's head and flavored with root beer:

Others in our group wanted to try Art City Donuts.  These guys were making hot, fresh mini gourmet donut masterpieces.  These were blueberry flavored.  We also tried the peach and vanilla:

That's it for now.  The next post will start a short series on my wife's family reunion.  We'll start in Salt Lake City and move on.  Stay tuned!!