BYU

Nathan made it out to BYU and went to football games the first couple of weekends.  He made a good friend, Karsen, as he was moving in.  Karsen offered to help him move his things in, and they have been good friends since then.  After the first game, they went out to eat after the game.  There were a few girls sitting nearby and they heard one of them say their goal was to get married in 3 months.  They laughed a little about that and started speaking Spanish.  A little while later, one of the girls came over and said she had served a mission in Panama, so she knew what they were saying!  It turned into a conversation and they had a double date by the end of the night.  The date never actually happened, but it was a pretty funny story.  He did go on a few dates later with a couple other girls.   

It turned out to be a tender mercy that I didn't fly out to UT to help Nathan move in.  A few weeks into the semester, he called and told us he was called to the High Council.  He needed to be ordained a High Priest for that calling, so Alex and I scrambled to find flights out there for the following Sunday.  It wasn't cheap or even very convenient, but we managed to get flights.  We had to make some last-minute arrangements for the kids at home to get to church and school.  We had a 5:30am flight out of LAX, so it was an early start.  We got into SLC around 8:45am and made it just in time for Nathan's 10:00am stake conference.  Nathan sang in the choir, so we didn't get to sit with him.  We got to listen to Nathan's mission president from Ecuador, Elder Roman, who was now a 70, speak at the conference.  We also met him and his wife after the conference.  Nathan also had the opportunity to participate in a panel on Friday evening.  He was the student representative, answering questions, along with Elder Roman and the Stake President.  Apparently he did a really good job at that meeting.  We ran into a couple girls from the ward on campus after the meeting that complimented Nathan on how he did on the panel.  

We had lunch in the cafeteria and then went for Nathan's ordination and setting apart to the High Council.  Alex got to do the ordination, so it was a pretty cool experience.  Later for dinner, we met up with the missionary, Brook Langston, that baptized Alex back in 1995.  Alex hadn't seen him since his baptism, and he hadn't been in contact until just a couple weeks prior to Nathan receiving his calling.  Brook had sought out Alex on Facebook and then contacted him.  We had a little zoom chat a couple weeks before we went to UT, and then it worked out great to have dinner with Brook and his family that Sunday evening.   

After dinner, we dropped off Nathan back at BYU, then headed to the airport.  Alex took a late flight back to CA because he had a conference the next morning in Anaheim.  So Alex wasn't even in UT for a full day.  Alison picked me up from the airport and I stayed the night at their home.  My flight back was on Monday afternoon, so I at least got to hang out with Alison and the kids for part of the day.  We just hung around, played with the cats, and watched the kids do their Monday routine.  I was back home by Monday night.  The hardest part of the trip for me was finding our car at the airport.  I had 2 one-way flights, so I didn't even fly into the same terminal that I left out of.  I didn't pay attention to that, so it was a little hard to find the parking garage.  I ended up wandering around in the parking garage and alleyways outside by myself until I could get to the right place.