Our 4th, 5th & 6th of July

Just sharing the events of our 3-day weekend. It was a pretty toasty one with temps in the 90s:



Here's our 6 little plastic American flags along the curb. (double click to enlarge)

4th—3 hours of yard work followed by 4 hours of geocaching to 1 regular and 3 more State Parks:
--The Jordan Parkway Modelport (for model airplanes)…not a soul in sight
--The Utah State Park Headquarters Office…not really a Park but the home of the Division of Natural Resources where this game originated
--The Point of the Mountain Flight Park…there were only a handful of Hang Gliders, but we saw a million grasshoppers and one huge black widow spider.
Then we had burgers on the BBQ with trimmings and went to see the always good (at least to me) fireworks display at Lagoon, from the perimeter road this year.


Check out the tiny cockleburs on my pants - from geocaching, of course.

Dad at the point of the mountain State Flight Park. This is where the Hang Gliders take off. Looking southwest to Lehi.

Our own little 4th of July BBQ at 9:00pm...sun was down (no heat) there was an occasional breeze (see hair) so there were no bugs...perfect! The raspberry jello salad with blueberries and whipped cream was refreshing.

The Finale at Lagoon.

5th—Off to finish the game of State Park Geocaching:
--Willard Bay…we have driven by this area hundreds of times in our life but never ventured in. It’s a big area with shaded camping spots and beaches and plenty of water for swimming and boating. There were 7 stages to this cache with the final ammo box being just a few yards from the starting point! Funny!!
--Hyrum Reservoir…we were surprised to find this pleasant spot right on the edge of town.
--Bear Lake Marina…wow it was busy, glad we weren’t trying to launch or retrieve a boat. The cache was across the street, up on a hill with a nice view of the lake.
--Bear Lake Rendezvous Beach on the southern tip of the lake by Laketown…not one of the original State Park caches from last year (don’t know why) so we could only count it as a regular cache, not one of the 47 listed in the game. We ended up with 44 out of the 47…at least one cache in every State Park! (Kinda funny that our last one was at Bear Lake. We didn’t have time for caching when we were up there last fall cleaning the house.) It was quite a quest. Now what will we do for entertainment?

While in Bear Lake, we stopped at the house, it was looking better than last year, had an ice cream bar at Minnetonka Market, went up to see G&G’s graves at the St. Charles Cemetery (it was 3 years to the day that Grampa Almy passed away). Then we drove around the little, old town of Laketown and we think we found the house where Almy grew up and then we went out to Round Valley (just a few miles west) where Almy was born. I had never been there and it was a beautiful, green, valley with no development, just a few farms. Peaceful and pristine would describe it. We didn’t see any people. We took the short circular drive around the valley and discovered the Round Valley Cemetery through a fence and up on a hill. It was amazing…small and fenced in (wooden poles) with wild flowers and lilac bushes and lots of aromatic sage. We felt we had stepped back in time and we think Dad was related to about everyone in cemetery…Earleys, Murphys, Spragues and others. We wish we had had the names of his ancestors with us. We came back to Farmington through Randolph and Monte Cristo (Causy Reservoir/Camp Browning) which should bring back a few memories to some of you.

Dad retrieving a cache at Hyrum Reservoir

Bear Lake with part of the marina from the hill across the road.

Beautiful Round Valley, Utah

The Round Valley Cemetery. We think this headstone is for Dad's great-grandfather's twin brother (which we didn't know he had). I think you can see the Earley name if you double click on the photo. We couldn't remember his great-grandfather's name at the time, but now we know that he is buried here also.

The Round Valley from the cemetery.

This shot is of Laketown from the Laketown Cemetery. Grampa Almy grew up in a home in the clump of trees (2nd back) on the left.

Laketown cow ("Welcome to our Cowbin") and chicken head.




Random vehicle--an International

Harvester Minivan???

6th—Slept in, went to church, ate waffles, took a short nap, logged our caches, picked raspberries (yep they’re ripening every day), took the best ones to a neighbor going through chemo, then we spent a few hours reading about Ireland and the British Isles, checking out ferry boat schedules, towns and sites and trying to start up an itinerary. Oh, no, 3 weeks won’t be enough! Something fun: Dad was looking on the internet at the town of Marston, Bedfordshire, England where the Barkers came from and while he was looking at the town he saw a short street named “Barker’s Piece” that ended in a kinda cul-de-sac of homes and green “pasture” surrounded by trees. We’ll undoubtedly have to go there and check it out…most likely named for “us”! I found on the internet some photos of Ramelton, Ireland, on the Lough (“arm of the sea”) Swilly and Lennon River, including several bars/pubs and a building called the “Ancestry Center”. I think my great-grandmother Eliza Flynn was born in this town in the County Donegal. Guess we’ve got to get to the Family History Center here in SLC…does it sound like we’ve been bitten by a genealogy bug?