A Little Vacation

We just got back from spending a week in St. George, Utah, dropping off our daughter, Elannah, to begin her independent adult life in her new apartment.

We stayed in our favorite vacation condo at Sports Village Condos. For the nightly price of a decent hotel room, we got a clean and spacious, fully furnished three-bedroom, two-bath condo that sleeps ten people, with A/C so powerful that we had to turn it down a bit so that we didn't have to wrap ourselves up in blankets just to stay warm inside. When it gets to 100 deg. F outside before 10am, A/C like that is a real luxury.

Froggie welcomes you to your home away from home.

The view from our spacious back porch. In the years when we're here for Independence Day, it's fun watching all the fireworks shoot up from all over the valley.

St. George in the summer is searingly hot and dry, but it's beautiful. Plus, there are palm trees, which makes it feel like a true vacation. We've been going there for the last five years, and Elannah fell in love with the area. While her initial plan was to attend Dixie State University when she signed the apartment lease in March, the lockdown put a halt to her ability to work and earn money for a few months, so she can't afford tuition yet. For now, she's excited to just work and experience independence--at least until her lease is up. We'll see what happens after that.

We spent a lot of time swimming in the clubhouse pool at the condo, but we didn't do any hiking in national parks or trekking around looking for lava tubes in Snow Canyon in the blistering heat. It was exercise enough just getting Elannah moved in to her third floor apartment. She's in off-campus student apartments, so she's rooming with and living amongst mostly DSU students. She's now in the process of finding a dental assisting job so that she can continue to live in the manner to which she has become accustomed: having a roof over her head and food enough to eat, plus a little cash for fuel and entertainment.

There were tears when Elannah and Sophia said good-bye to each other. I think Sophia, who is two years older, also felt a little like a failure in that moment. Here was her younger sister moving out of the house and living on her own while Sophia currently lives at home. I reminded Sophia that she has been on her own before, too. She lived a year on her own and had a great job before moving back home, and even now she's working a job while getting a BYU-Idaho online degree in business management through the Pathways program, so it's not like she's sitting around doing nothing with her life. She's also a certified U-Jam instructor and runs a weekly class at the local gym. I think she felt a bit better after I reminded her of all of that. But she'll still miss Elannah, who is her best friend. Those two together make me laugh so hard.

Next week will be crazy. Both Husband and I have full workloads getting ready for the school year to start on the 25th, and Husband also has an eye surgery. Wish us luck. I still don't really know what I'm doing in my new job, so this will be interesting in a lot of ways.