Feeling the Season

I love fall. I love the smell of the air, the warm golden sunshine and how the mountains turn into a giant, colorful patchwork quilt. I love the option of wearing a light jacket in the morning and short sleeves in the afternoon. I love that school starts again. Thinking back to when I was still in school, I loved the prospect of making new friends and seeing old ones. Now that I have kids in school, I'm excited for the same prospects for them (okay, I'll admit that I like to have them back to some sort of routine as well.)

We try to take a drive up into the mountains every fall when the leaves are at their most colorful. Sometimes we just drive through the Alpine Loop, sometimes we take a dirt road and go somewhere. This year we did the latter.

We loaded Brad's Jeep with the requisite hot dogs, buns, and s'more fixin's and headed up American Fork Canyon. We drove on the bone crunchingly rough Timpooneke (why did they change the spelling of the trail? It used to be Timpanoeke. Maybe I'll look that up sometime. Ha.) until we could see Utah Valley in front of us. I'm not joking when I say the road is bumpy. Brad took Rachel and me on that road when I was 7 and a half months pregnant with Em and I started to go into labor. Yeah, that was kind of a scary excursion.

Yeah, it really was that bumpy.

We roasted our food in a great fire pit that Brad and Caleb made and we all had a good time. It was cloudy and chilly up on Timp, but other than that, how can you complain when you have roasted meat on a stick and bubbly, sticky marshmallows?

Hey, where are the cups? On the kitchen counter.






When we drove off the bumpy road and on to pavement, the kids made the comment that they were grateful for paved roads. Me too. We came home and Brad watched the vice presidential debates. I love the fall.