The Road Home

Like our journey to California, our road home started late. We're used to that. It meant, however, that we grabbed "danishes" from the hotel's convenience store for breakfast. Stale pastries and Fizzies: breakfast of champions!

My childhood friend Anita Hatch (nee Sharp) had suggested that as we enter Utah, we veer off the I-15 and take the old highway 91. It  so much reminded me of something my dad might have done on one of our family vacations growing up.

It was almost a forest of joshua trees as far as the eye could see.

There was something really beautiful about the landscape that captivated me. Little did I know that shortly it was going to become even more amazing as we passed Snow Canyon.

We took this alternate route so we could grab lunch with Anita in St. George. It had been 30 years since we'd seen one another, but it was like no time had passed at all. Oh, sure, we were older, but the friendship we had shared since we were 2-3 continued unabated. It was so great to catch up with her.

She'd also brought along some pages from her scrapbook, which included grade school class photos. She wanted to see if the boys could find their dad in some of them: without hesitation, they pointed to me guffawing at photo after photo. And quizzing me why my hair was nearly blonde in the earlier photos - it didn't turn chestnut brown (as my mother-in-law used to call it when correcting Kelly's assement that it's black) until I was a teenager.

I noticed something about myself in those photos as well: my mom, an accomplished seamstress, who always made most of my school clothes,  had me donning slacks and jackets in rather bold colors. In one, I'm the styling kid sporting a burgundy corduroy suit. Pretty much, I was the only kid to wear a jacket in those school photos...except for the other 2 Greek kids, John Something and Chris Lambos. They always had jackets too.

Oh, if you were hoping to see one of these photos...not on your life!

After getting to meet Anita's daughter - and a chance for the boys to make a cameo in the movie she was making for a class project - we said good bye and headed back on to the road.

A couple of hours out of St. George, we stopped to get gas and stretch our legs. That's when Kelly channeled my dad. All of a sudden we were driving down a little road a couple of miles out of our way to go tour Cove Fort, an 1860s Mormon fort.

Not to toot my own home, but I impressed our docent by knowing that Ira Hinckley had to be an ancestor of, "that guy who was the head of the LDS church." (Gordon B. Hinckley was his grandson.) Then I floored her by identifying a photo of Brigham Young. For my school-boy performance, I was promised a Book of Mormon AND something called The Doctrine of the Covenants...neither of which were presented to me.

But the star of our family's tour was Gus. The kid's knowledge of pioneer life was down-right savant-like! He even knew that the smaller-sized rifle hanging up in the boys' room was used by younger guys to learn to shoot. The docent was visibly impressed with what Gus knew and asked where he attends school. I'm pretty sure there was a little pride when he said, "Saint Sophia, it's a Greek Orthodox school."

At the end of the tour, she gave the boys a yo-yo like toy.

These Books of Mormon are in a variety of different languages, including Greek

After asking me if Greek Orthodox believe in Jesus (um, we're the original Christians, all other denominations stem from our 2,000-year old beliefs), she showed us how the toy only worked when the dial was in the center. She told the boys to think of the dial as Jesus and the string as their lives, that life only works when Jesus is in the center of it.

A nice message, sure. Then she said, "And in our religion we believe when you die, you go to heaven and spend eternity with your family."

I gave her a long, hard look and said, "We've been on vacation together for a week, trapped together 24/7. So not interested in spending eternity together!"

She laughed. Somehow I think she believed I was kidding!