Phoenix

We went to Phoenix for the week.  We drove down after church and arrived after midnight.  When we tried to check in our key wouldn't work.  You could see a little light on in the kitchen which I assumed was a welcome lamp.  They sent a maintenance man to see why and he finally used his master key to get us in but the door stopped after a couple of inches as the security chain was attached.  Then my sister Laura peeked her head out to say, 'hello?'  For some reason, they checked us into the Sessions condo and the maintenance person told the front desk there was a problem.  The front desk tried to tell us we were all supposed to be together which we knew was NOT the case.  Although some of my siblings were there with their families, we all paid for and reserved our own 2 bedroom condos.  After the mix up, we were settled into our own room.  They are beautiful and spacious and had a balcony overlooking a nice grassy area with lawn games, little lights at night and a fire pit.  In all, we had 4,  2 bedroom condos all next to each other.

The week was full of swimming in the sunshine, playing games with cousins and relaxing. 

 Most floats in the lazy river were relaxing unless the kids wrestled with grandpa to dunk him.

One evening we were swimming and a dust storm was coming so they made everyone go inside. The sky had an eerie glow but nothing much came from it.

Another evening, we all went down to the fire pit to roast s'mores and told a scary story about the badgers in the desert (right next to the fire pit).  Then Dave jumped out to scare everyone.
We had so many laughs and good times and if any of the kids were too rowdy, we would simply say loudly, "I wonder who those kids belong to.  Who are their parents?" and we were all off the hook.

Taylor and I slipped away one morning early to go to the Mesa temple.  It was all great until on the way home, we were rear ended and Taylor got a ticket for his license expiring in April.  He wasn't happy but we quickly recovered and still had a fantastic day because at least the car still worked and could get us home.  Taylor took Carissa and Sophie to the new museum of music and they really loved it.  It had the worlds largest collection of instruments.