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Tonight I decided I was a bit peckish, so I whipped up a batch of baked chocolate pudding and made a nighttime snack of it.

Orange juice in a wine goblet? Oh yeah, baby.

Our epic trip plans didn’t survive the day.

As I started checking out hotel prices in Monterey this afternoon, I noticed a strange thing: they were unbelievably expensive. The Red Roof Inn, for example, wanted $457 per night for a two-queen room! Even places like the Motel 6– where you’re lucky if the sheets are even fitted to the mattress– was asking $160 per night.

Sure, Monterey is a nice area, but I couldn’t believe the prices. Our stay at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas was going to be cheaper than the Super 8 in Monterey. But then I figured out that the week we’re planning to be out there is some huge collectible car show called the Concours d’Elegance. Apparently car enthusiasts from the world over converge on Monterey in early August and drool over each others’ wheels. If I was a car enthusiast I might have known that, I suppose.

Anyway, it turns out that hotels in that area literally triple their normal room rates for that week only. Sure enough, as I started adjusting dates on the various reservation tools, I saw the prices fall back to more “normal” rates. Hmm.

After talking to our friends, it became clear that we couldn’t shift the dates of our trip (long story) so instead we had to pick a different destination. We weren’t really all that picky in the first place; Monterey sounded cool and one of our goals for the trip was a beach. So after a bit of thought, we changed our itinerary to take us down to San Diego instead.

This new route shaved off a day of driving and almost 500 miles. And it still includes a beach.

We’re planning an epic summer trip.

It started out simply enough: we invited a couple of friends and their families to join us in Winter Park for a day of fun riding the alpine slide, playing miniature golf, and running the human maze. One of my friends suggested we get a cabin up in the area and stay the night, so I did some poking around and found a few cabins that seemed reasonable. Finding one big enough for fourteen people in all was a little tricky, but it seemed like we’d get a good deal. When our plans were set, I started making the reservations for the cabin. It turned out that one night wasn’t okay– everyone wants two or three nights at minimum. Okay, with a little more conversation amongst our group we decided to go up the night before. More fun together, right?

Then it turned out there was a cleaning fee. And a damage deposit. And taxes. By the time all was said and done, we were looking at about $800 per family for two nights in a cabin, a day at Winter Park, and a couple of restaurant meals. Whoa.

Jokingly, one of my friends suggested we just take a road trip to California instead. I had mentioned that a few weeks earlier– what if our three families trucked out to the beach for a few days? Well, given the expense of our Winter Park adventure, it seemed like we could take a road trip… for a little more cash and have a whole lot more fun.

Today we sat down and started planning. By the time we were finished with our itinerary, we’d mapped a route through Zion National Park, Las Vegas, north Los Angeles, Monterey, and some lonely towns in the desolation of central Nevada.

All told, we’re looking at 40 hours of driving across 10 days, covering at least 2,700 miles. We’ll see a bunch of awesome stuff, visit family in Utah, friends in California, and do it all in two vans (one of which is a rental). This is going to be epic.

Kyra turned 17 this week– wow. Yesterday she had a little birthday party for her closest friends. In addition to watching The Princess Bride and eating pizza, it involved some kind of card game that included a lot of slapping each other and screaming.

Yeah, it’s really something to have four teenage girls yelling for an hour.

Then today, to finish celebrating her birthday, she had all four of her wisdom teeth pulled. She was pretty loopy coming back from the oral surgeon, and promptly flopped down on the couch and went to sleep.

Right now she’s not feeling too bad, but I know later today she’ll be pretty unhappy. Fortunately we’ll get this whole thing out of the way before a few more family trips and the start of school…

Last week we headed out to Utah for Laralee’s somewhat-annual family reunion. As long as we were out there, we decided to stop in at BYU to take a look at the campus. Along with Colorado School of Mines, Alex accepted their offer to attend and then immediately deferred his start date for two years. Despite reading about BYU’s engineering program, Alex had never seen the campus.

He was pretty excited about it.

Unlike Mines, it’s a big school with over 30,000 students enrolled. We had a student tour guide who was bubbling with energy as she took us around campus and told us how awesome BYU is. We had some great views of the campus from the top of the highest building:

After our tour we dropped in on the mechanical engineering and computer science departments. I enjoyed this sign on one of the computer labs:

I don’t know if the university budget is a little tight this year or something, but I was surprised to see the, uhh, outdoor bathroom facilities at the library:

Alex found an interesting sculpture of modern art with a head-sized hole in it.

After BYU and some lunch at Smashburger, we stopped by Mr. Mac, which is a well-known men’s clothier. It was time to buy Alex a suit for his mission. They had quite a few options in rows and rows:

Fortunately he’s occasionally like me– quick and decisive– and was able to pick out a suit he liked after modeling a couple of them. He was measured so everything could be tailored just right. Pretty cool.

I found a pretty sweet tweed jacket. Wearing it made me feel like a weird professor in the 1950’s or something.

After a little over an hour, we walked out with a suit, two pairs of matching pants, five more pairs of “bucket washable” (!) slacks, eight white shirts, eight ties, two pairs of durable dress shoes, a dozen pairs of socks, two belts, and a nice layered fleece coat. Whew! Alex is ready for the bustling metropolis of Lima or the rugged mountain villages of Peru.

On our way out of the store I couldn’t help but notice this sign for a restaurant in the food court:

That’s right: there’s an entire restaurant devoted to grilled cheese. Wow.

All in all, it was a great few days with family.

Amazon sent us a huge box the other day.

What could be in it? The mystery was killing me. I took a peek.

Hmm. Kyra with a towel on her head. I wouldn’t have guessed that…

Boy, I tell you, boxes this big are a dream for little kids. Maybe we should donate it to someone in the neighborhood.

For Independence Day, Kyra painted her nails red and blue and added some silver stars. Pretty cool.

She was sure to point out that the colors were “muted”, so they matched Captain America’s outfit. Of course.

I saw a picture of Bech on Facebook and couldn’t resist adding some captions.

Alex came home from martial arts the other night, walking in the door and saying to me in an excited voice, “Dad, guess what I did at martial arts tonight?” I couldn’t guess, so he told me: “I got shocked with a stun gun!”

It was funny that he was so excited about it. He’s in a self-defense class where they practice moves intended to break free of attackers. Having joined him for a few of the classes in the past, I know they don’t mess around– they throw each other to the mat and only moderately hold back their kicks and whatnot. Apparently one of the instructors brought a live stun gun to the class and showed it to the students. After class, Alex was talking to him about it and he asked if Alex wanted to see what it felt like. Of course! Alex said he was stunned on the arm, and it was a jolt and some tingling afterward but “not like being tased”. Now I guess I should wonder how Alex knows what tasing feels like…

Last night we went to see Jurassic World. Heck, we enjoyed the original Jurassic Park twenty years ago and despite the lackluster sequels, it seemed like this new movie would be a lot of fun.

After dropping fifty bucks for tickets, we found out that “a lot of fun” meant a ton of impressive special effects wrapped around a story so filled with problems that it was laughable. Although I haven’t seen Pacific Rim, often held up as the pinnacle of movies which are all action and no plot, I imagine it was something like Jurassic World except with more robots.

As the T-Rex roared in the final scene (surprise!) and the credits started to roll, my only comment was “This movie is going to make a billion dollars.” They were halfway after just the first two days on screen, so I imagine this will be one of the highest-grossing movies of all time within a matter of weeks.

We literally spent our thirty-minute drive home picking out all of the plot holes and bad decisions throughout the movie. It was fun (and funny). In the end, I must say the movie was entertaining but only in the way that a slow-motion train wreck is entertaining…