UTAH TRIP DAY 3--BYU, HERE WE COME!
We slept in Saturday morning. We only woke up in time to still get breakfast at the hotel. Then we headed for Provo. We drove around campus a bit and wow, have they been busy! They tore down the Knight Mangum building, leaving a nice lawn in its place. That was a shock. They finished the beautiful Hinckley building, and added on to the Talmage and Tanner buildings. Campus hardly looks like it did when I arrived way back in '95!

We bought some BYU tee shirts at the book store. I'd promised Ryan a BYU polo shirt for his birthday, but they were all $50! So instead, we bought a $4 Y patch and I'll sew it on a $15 navy polo from Target or something. What a rip off!

Ryan was trying to find a place to watch the football game at noon, because tickets sold out a long time ago. The game came on the small overhead tv's in the book store, so Ryan just watched it there. I knew the boys would tear everything off the shelves if we stayed in the store, so we wandered around campus instead. Ryan met us at the Eyering Science Center during half-time. There are lots of new building I wanted to explore a bit, and they have cool things like fountains to float leaves in, raised walls to walk like a balance beam, acorns to gather and throw, etc. So the boys had fun. They sure wore me out, though!

After the game, we ate a very late lunch in the Cougar Eat, where Zach thought the plethora of booster seats seemed like giant MegaBlocks. He carried them all over to our table and built a tower with them!

Then drove up Provo Canyon. We love the canyon, and of course Ryan wanted to see what they'd done with the road. They changed it a lot! It's no longer a winding 2-lane, and they made a bridge so the cars mostly don't go over the dam anymore. It must be an anti-terrorist thing, because it seems like the government is trying to get the roads off of dams lately.

The sun was setting, so we headed back north to Salt Lake. We'd promised the boys a ride on TRAX, the light rail train that runs through downtown. We just rode around downtown for about half an hour, and the boys loved it! We train-surfed (meaning trying to stand up while not holding onto anything--I learned bus-surfing in Brazil) and stood in the part that bends and even rode it to the end of the line and got to see the driver transform the front car into the back car (so they don't have to turn it around).

Then we went to Arctic Circle to get the boys some Square Pumpkins with Halloween Flashlights in them. We've never been to Arctic Circle before. I'd only gone through the drive through for cheap ice-cream cones. We were the only ones there, and the lady gave us all sorts of stuff because he said the boys were just too cute. She gave us an extra cup for soda (I tried to refuse), and told the boys that if they ate all their dinner, they could have an ice cream cone. Zach didn't earn his, but Jared got a chocolate dipped ice cream cone for free! And then as we were leaving, she ran after us and handed us two more Halloween Flashlights. Which is a good thing because one of Jared's stopped working that same night (cheap junk!) As generous as the lady was, I don't think we'll be going back. The food's kinda gross.