Jared's Wedding

Jared married Merle in Provincetown, MA on October 3, 2009. Dave was there, as Jared's best man. There were dinner parties both Friday and Saturday nights, and a ceremony on Saturday afternoon in a classic New England church by a female Unitarian minister.

Jared and Merle created the ceremony from various traditions, including lighting a candle together and stamping on a crystal goblet (a Jewish tradition).

After the ceremony, friends of Jared and Merle celebrated with dinner and cake.

Between the parties and wedding, Dave had time to enjoy quaint Provincetown, with its bookstores, art galleries, and, of course, the sea.

The Narrows Encore

On the weekend of September 26, 2009, Dave took a group of work friends down the Narrows. After three trips down the Narrows, Gretta stayed in St. George. David's guests included Paul Larson, a fellow ward member and head of the film program at the University of Utah.

Other members of the group were Gudrun, a social worker who works with Dave at Intermountain Health Care and her friend Mark, a lawyer, and their friends, Cliff and Olga, documentary film makers from San Francisco. The film makers had been to as many exotic places as our Michael, including filming primitive tribes in the Amazon and veiled women in Afghanistan.

The Narrows hike included all the highlights that Dave had experienced at least half a dozen times before. The group started out walking along shallow hills surrounding the Virgin River...

then plunging deeper into the canyon...

and hiking so far inside steep rock walls that there was no greenery...

climbing around the waterfall...

visiting Big Springs...

and, finally, emerging at the bottom of the Narrows, totally exhausted.

Gretta enjoyed the peace of the St. George house.

She also took a break from work to walk around Coral Canyon, finding little spots of beauty on her walk.

Later, Gretta went outside and caught the splendor of the desert sunset.

Here's one more view of the reason for the weekend:

Off to Chicago! And more...

Jonny and Jenny left for Chicago on Tuesday, September 15. Jonny will start law school at the University of Chicago in a couple of weeks. Gretta insisted they get a really big truck so they could take all their treasures, but she didn't realize how HUGE it would be.

Jenny's family arrived en masse on Tuesday morning to pack J&J's belongings onto the truck.

Then, we took some final family pictures....

Dave and Gretta tracked J&J all day long, as they rode the freeway through rain and sunshine to Cheyenne, where they stayed, as Earl Holding's guests, at the Little America. Luckily, it was right by the freeway, so Jonny didn't have to maneuver the truck, with car hooked on behind, very much. They were in Chicago by nightfall the next day, and Jenny's dad soon arrived to help them unpack and then celebrate by attending a Cubs baseball game.

Gretta comforted herself, after J&J left, with a ward "empty nesters" tour of the City Cemetery. Half the fun was being with old friends, the Pettys, Moenches, Youngs, Micki Dennis, Hornes, and Kim Wilson.

A Church historian pointed out graves of Wilford Woodruff, Emmeline Wells (early Relief Society president), Anthony Ivins (apostle who often visited the Mormon colonies in Mexico), and Joseph Fielding Smith.

We celebrated Sunday dinner with Michael, our one precious child left in Salt Lake City.