Callister and Co.: Birthday Celebrations

Well, I'm finally getting around to blogging again. To say it's been a little crazy around here, is quite the UNDERstatement.

I gave Dave his birthday basket on Thursday morning to use during his golf weekend. BUT his actually birthday was the next Monday. So he already received his present....I was somewhat at a loss of what to do. He ended up going golfing in the morning with my Uncle Corey. By the time he got back, I had hatched a plan, and Grandma was there to watch the kids. I wanted to break away from the norm, and do something different. And since I knew he already got exactly what he wanted, why not do something random together?

Since we were planning a move to Tennessee, I thought it might be appropriate to do some "Utah" things, that he loved. One of his great "Utah" loves, are the mountains. Hiking, camping, just being in nature. So I found a hike that looked fun, and we went on it. I made sure it wasn't a long hike since he had already played a game of 18 holes of golf. Round trip it was just over 1 mile! Perfect. The trail is in American Fork and called Battle Creek Falls. It was quite beautiful, and fun being together, sans kids, in nature.

This would be the most amazing view in the fall! Now that we're staying, we might just have to go back and see all the beautiful colors.

Next up was dinner at his favorite, P.F. Chang's. Well, he had had a pretty big lunch and wasn't quite ready to eat so early (I think it was about 5:00) so we headed up to do the last item, and then planned to go to dinner. I kept warning him that it was really random, but again, wanted to break away from the "classic" date night of dinner and a movie. So on our drive to Santiquin, yes, Santiquin, we listened to music, enjoyed a car ride and each other's company with out the crazies usually in the back.

And arrived at The Red Barn. It's an apple orchard that harvests all different kids of fresh apples and other fruit. Because of the time of year the actual orchards weren't growing apples, but they still had delicious fresh fruit from other local farms. I kept telling Dave on the drive up how ironic it was, he didn't quite understand, and I wasn't about to fill him in......the ironic part was that we had passed a few apple orchards already. He commented at each one how pretty they were, which gave me hope that he wouldn't think I was crazy for bringing him.

The main reason I wanted to go, was to get him fresh, pure, delicious apple juice. It's his favorite, and me, who doesn't really like apple juice...LOVED it. It was pretty much amazing. While we were there, we had to try samples of their delicious chocolate covered fruit. And of course buy some other goodies for ourselves. Part of my original idea was to come here after dinner so we could have dessert of fresh ice cream....but he was still full...so we settles on buying treats for later. Carmel apple, peanut butter truffles, pear butter, apple syrup, and the amazing apple juice.