An Almost Most Excellent Weekend

This coming weekend should be pretty good! I am excited for a road trip that I have planned. That’s right! Road trip!

But first, a little background. Emily Heaton is moving from Provo to New York this weekend. Her husband has been out there working since the end of April, while she was taking classes this spring term. And now she’s going to join him. After the summer of working, they will move to Georgia, where Benjamin just got accepted to go to school. That’s also where Emily will have their first baby! It’s due just a couple weeks after school starts, so they’ve got a busy end of the summer planned!

Anyway, Emily is driving out to New York so that they can have their car, which is here in Utah, and she invited me to road trip it with her. I think this is an absolutely fabulous idea! Emily is one of my favorite people, and once she moves to NY and GA, I probably won’t see her very frequently. This road trip is a great chance to have some fun with her before we live across the country from each other!

It’s also going to be very fun because of the places we’ll go on the trip. First of all, Emily and I go way back. We were mission companions 3 times during our 18-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We started out in a historic city for our church, Nauvoo, Illinois, and we were companions there for several months. Then, during the winter, we were both sent to Greeley, Colorado to serve part of our mission there. We were roommates there with a couple other sisters, and then we were companions for the last half of our 7 months there. And when we went back to Nauvoo to finish our missions, we were companions again for about a month and we were roommates most of the time that we weren't companions. So we share a lot of history.

And we get to visit both Greeley and Nauvoo on our way to New York! One of the sisters that we served with in Greeley, Melissa Atwood (now Ferguson), still lives in Greeley, and she and her husband Pat are going to host us for one night in Greeley. Then we'll drive to Nauvoo, and stay there for a night. I am so happy that I finally get to return to the cities where I served as a missionary. It's been 2 and 1/2 years since I came home from my mission! I will be taking lots of pictures, and journaling a lot, and just loving the experience.

The only down side to this (which prevents it from being an Absolutely Most Excellent Weekend) is that I will miss Dave! The weekends are the time that we get to see each other the most, and it's hard to give that up. It is amazing to me how much I miss him during the day, just want to be around him, and love chatting with him while we're apart. We must be in love, or something! We do things to help us get through the long week when we can't spend a lot of time together. This week, we met halfway between our two houses, and went on a two-hour date. We went to the temple and then wandered around Ikea. Yeah, maybe not the most romantic, but it was satisfying because I was with Dave. So, that will be the only hitch to my weekend. Can't I just pack him up in my suitcase and bring him with me?