9th and 9th Street Festival

 

I took Reese and Riley to this street festival in 2019 and was so excited to take them again this year! We walked around and looked at all the booths, got churros, played games and had a fun time people and dog watching. In the photos, how many differences can you spot? Hehe. We stopped at a booth that had cool headpieces and the girl with the Fohn Event Venue and Florals put these flower crowns on Reese and Riley. So funny.

Wasatch Wildflower Festival

One of my Facebook friends RSVP'd to an event invite called Wasatch Wildflower Festival up in Big Cottonwood Canyon. It was on Sunday and so after church I picked up Reese, Riley and my friend Karina and we headed up.

Thanksgiving Point - Tulip Festival!

Recently I found out I won 4 tickets from ArtsyFartsyMama's blog to the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point. Since I was leaving town on the 25th and the tickets arrived in the mail on the 20th, it didn't give me a lot of time to use them. No worries though because I made it work on Wednesday evening before Tony & I headed out of town.

Spark! Mesa Festival of Creativity

My friend Jennifer told me about this cool arts festival going on in Mesa and it so happened to be the Saturday I was in town. Score! I picked up my friend Catt and we met Jennifer and her friends at the Mesa Arts Center around 2pm.

Catt & I found a fireman so cute he couldnt show us his face. Haha

I expected to see a lot more sidewalk chalk art but this is all there was.
Still cool to watch for a few minutes though

The process

Such a nice day, the kids were playing in the water

The trees had sweaters (thanks to Jennifer for taking this picture!)

Lego building event. So fun to watch a little of that

This is what people were working to build

 so funny again when I saw more trees with sweaters

Then we got involved in a project that involved painting cardboard tubes.

My friend Catt in the red shirt working on her creation

Impressive 

Click to make this collage bigger. Super interesting to see what different people did to come up with fun ways to cut out and paint their cardboard. Of course I did an owl ;-)

The finished products side by side. I really like the way Catt's tree with the flower garden around it turned out.

More art :)

The beginnings of a tea party...these people moved really slowly - 

interesting to watch

awesome bird lady - had to take a pic!

Got to see Squonk Opera perform. They were very entertaining!

Check them out some more here.

It was a great way to end the afternoon.

Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque Part 1

It's that time of year again! I heart hot air balloons and it's the largest hot air balloon festival in the world going down in New Mexico. Right now! (Oct 6-14). This year we headed out on Friday, the 5th. Picked up our rental car (awesome Prius!) from the Toyota dealership in the morning and it was hard to work for 8 hours knowing where we were headed. Drove all night, really all night! To get to Albuquerque Saturday morning for the party!

I slept off and on during the trip and woke up in Monticello. Asked Tony, is that a temple? Turns out it was. I'd never heard of Monticello, UT before and had no idea they even had a temple. So funny!

Got to the park at 4am and slept in the car for about 30 min while Tony got dressed in warmer clothes and made us hot chocolate. It was so surreal being back here again! 

Met up with my friend Judy from AZ and met the 2 guys crewing with her for the next 9 days. Ray from PA and Hubert from the Netherlands I think. Really nice guys! We all went to the pilot briefing where we found out it was going to be too windy for any balloons to go up that morning and possibly the evening too. Sadness! So we hung out, did some shopping and checked out some visitors that landed on the field.

Judy gave me the balloon patch for me to stick on my jacket. Replica of her balloon that we helped her with on Sunday.

There was a wood carving competition , pretty cool but we did not get to see people carving. They had 90 minutes though to make a carving and then they items were raffled off and the donations stayed in the community, for the fire dept or something. It was really cool.

Tony had a Boise State game to watch so I dropped him off at a sports bar and headed to my friend Carli's house to watch some conference and hang out for a bit. We had a great chat, it was really nice seeing her again. The time went too fast and then it was time to meet up with Tony again. He bought me food ( I picked a Caesar salad with chicken ) and since we got hooked up with passes and parking for helping Judy with her balloon, we gave our tickets to the people at the table next to us. In turn , they paid for $10 of our bill. Pretty nice of them!

*The balloon festival has iffy weather so its good to have a backup plan. Since we paid for parking and entrance in and no balloons went up we were able to use our purchased tickets to get in to the park a different time.*

We checked in to the hotel after the game (Boise State won!) and Tony caught up on sleep, we listened to some conference and watched a few of our shows Tony downloaded. I checked for updates on the weather and we decided to head to the field again to see if any balloons would inflate and watch the fireworks.

Part 2 - tomorrow!

There Was A Parade..

Shoot, there was a parade on July 4th and I dont think I ever blogged about it. For shame. So here you go! Pictures from the parade and a little fair/carnival that we went to afterwards :)

What's this coming down the street?

Only in Utah. Omygoodness. These were kinda creepy

Little Ceasers Pizza - not creepy!

Smokey the Bear! I took this picture for Tony :) 

and Linda S. in CA too :)

Rode Tony's motorcycle from the parade just a block or two away to a car show and small festival. Here are a bunch of nice cars parked on grass...

Shoes...yesss

The police drive fancy here...

Then I found a panda! So appropriate that I was wearing a panda (&owl) on my shirt :)

Our friends Gabe, Steph and Austin were there with us (we also sat with them at the parade) but we didnt get a picture with them! Got some food to eat for lunch , walked around a bit and then parted way. It was a fun way to spend part of the 4th of July since we had to stick around town and couldn't travel. Silly holidays in the middle of the week!