St. George Temple

The temple is looking closer and closer to being finished.  I cannot wait until they announce the dates for the open house and dedication.  It is looking so beautiful. (I did not take this picture.)

Southern Virginia University?

While we were at MSU checking out the college, Bryan had a thought that Courtney might like to attend Southern Virginia University.  I mentioned it to Courtney who, after looking at the weather, applied.  She went through the application process (interviews, transcript review, honor code recommendation, etc.) and was admitted.  But she had learned her lesson.  She doesn't want to say "yes" for sure until she visited campus and took a tour.  So we are now planning to visit SVU.

Snowing again

It is snowing again!

I have to document all the times it snows because it has been so crazy this year!

It beat him

Ethan has been dealing without a coat at BYU.  He has been wearing sweatshirts and said that he didn't need a coat.  Well, it finally beat him.  I sent a coat up to him and he was very appreciative of it!

It's snowing again

Ivins had 2 more days of snow, which is crazy.  It doesn't stick for a long time but it's enough to give us the water we need for the summer.

Freezing cold college tour

We woke up to -13 degree temperatures!  We ate some breakfast and then left the hotel to go to the campus for our college tour.  I didn't know what to expect.  I thought that we would be the only ones on the tour because who goes to Bozeman, MT in February to check out MSU?!  We parked in the parking garage and made our way to the building where the tour would begin.  It was so windy and cold!

When we found the correct room there were quite a few others waiting for the tour.  They showed a video talking about how great MSU is and then they split us into groups to go on the tour.  They offered a virtual tour to those who didn't want to freeze but no one raised their hand so we ended up outside in -20something wind chill weather.  There were 4 groups of about 5 students each (add to that the parents and siblings that came to tour also).

This is how we looked before the tour:

Courtney froze during the tour! A few times they had huge wind gusts so the man doing the tour had us hunker down to wait out the wind.  

Courtney had to do the traditional photo in front of the bobcat mascot statue.  

This is the building where Great-Grandpa Hodgson worked when he taught at MSU.  It hasn't been remodeled too much yet so it looked like it did years ago.  It was cool to go inside and see it.

This is us after the tour.

We were finished with the tour about 4 hours before our flight out but we made our way to the airport to wait.  It was too cold to walk around Bozeman and there wasn't anything else we needed to see.  By the time we were halfway to the airport, it was snowing really hard.  We made it just fine but were happy to be out of the snow. It definitely was an adventure.

Visiting Montana State University

Courtney wanted to check out Montana State University.  We found a good time for both of us, found some cheap plane tickets, and took off. We flew out of Las Vegas where it was beautiful weather.  We landed in the snowy tundra!

We rented a car to travel around and it ended up being Courtney's dream car.  She was so excited when she saw our ride.

It was so snowy!  The car we rented had 4-wheel drive and I was so grateful.  Everyone was sliding around and it seemed normal.  I was so nervous that we were going to be stuck in the high snow.

We checked into our hotel and it was really nice.

We explored Bozeman, found Great-Grandma Hodgson's house, and then decided to go to the cemetery to find Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma Pack's graves. Courtney was so sure she knew right where we needed to go to find their graves.  And she was right!  Although we didn't get to see their headstones because the snow was SO HIGH!

We tried to get to their headstones but we were sinking up to our knees so we decided to abort the mission and take a selfie from afar.  We figured we had tried and that's what mattered.

This is what we saw in the cemetery:

After sliding around all day in the snow as we drove, we ate dinner at Costco (across the street from our hotel) and then we went to bed.  We followed the natives and put up our windshield wipers so they wouldn't freeze.  Did I say that it was -8 degrees?!