Of 1980s College Dorm Units, Prison Inmates Speaking from the Dead, and Cherry Hill

Happy Moldovian Independence Day. Yeah, I don't know where "Moldova" is either. But if the picture I'm looking at on my iPad "This Day in History" app is any indication, they have lots of hay there. And guys with sticks riding around on horses. Sounds like a dream vacation destination if ever there was one. Forget Paris!

Speaking of vacations, on Wednesday Alyssa and I went to Park City and stayed at...well, I'm not really sure how to describe it. The best I can come up with is "College Dorm Room From the 1980s Now Being Used as a Timeshare Unit But Not Quite Refurbished." But t'was fun, t'was fun. We didn't have time for our usual slew of wacky adventures, though we did walk around the old town and visit the Park City museum and jail. They have some way rad stuff in there, including a 30-foot high scale model of a silver mine, a stagecoach built by Parley P. Pratt, and a book that contains a video screen so that when you flip the pages, various dead former inmates of the jail appear on the screen and tell you their life stories. It was like one of those newspapers from Harry Potter, except not lame. (Boy, am I going to get it for that one.)

Two weekends ago we went with various children, parents, and siblings to Cherry Hill, a waterpark in the Ogden area, because we had a slew of free coupons left over from that gift basket that Alyssa won at that Japanese Church of Christ thing two years ago. My thinking before going was, hey, I'd never even heard of the place before, so we'd probably be the only ones there--in fact, we had better hurry and get our fannies in gear before the place went out of business! In actuality, I'm pretty sure everyone in the Ogden-Layton metro area and their children was there. You could hardly even move. But good times were mostly had. Oh sure, there was the official Ride Where You Go Down A Slide in A Tire And Spend Half The Ride Spinning Around In Circles Because You're Too Fat, but other than that, good times. Actually, we spent most of the day going around and around in the Lazy River because the children didn't want to do anything else. How you folks with wee children ever get to do ANYTHING fun is beyond me at this stage of my life.

Here we are in front of the "Up" house, which was recently built in Herriman and shown in the Parade of Homes. It's a pretty authentic reproduction, inside and out. It even has its own official Carl Fredricksen and Russell, as you can see. (I'm pretty sure they were sick of sitting there morning, noon, and night for pictures, but they had pretty good attitudes about it.)