London Bridge

Now that the few people who read this blog know Emily is pregnant again, we can finally share this part of our trip to Utah for Thanksgiving. Instead of driving straight home, we took a detour. A long detour. Since we hadn't told anyone about Emily's pregnancy at this point, we didn't tell anyone where we were headed other than home.

With every pregnancy, we like to take a picture holding up a onesie in front of some sort of landmark or something. Emily thought it would be kind of neat to take it with something that had a London connection, this, mainly because the first one we took for Hadley's was when we were in London. Emily proposed that we go to Lake Havasu in Arizona and take the picture in front of the Old London Bridge that was sold in the late 1960's and brought to the US. The bridge spanned the River Thames from 1831 until 1967.

So, the closest we would be to Lake Havasu, would be if we drove down after Thanksgiving. I was on paternity leave, and we called the school letting them know the girls would miss the first few days following the break. On Monday morning, we headed South instead of North, and since the girls wanted to get donuts, we stopped at Dough Miner in Salt Lake. These things were huge, but they were rather doughy and pretty underwhelming. It was one of the places I had seen on Instagram, so wanted to at least try them, but now we know. Emily got a bagel with an insane amount of cream cheese.

We were scheduled to get to Lake Havasu at around dinner time. To break the trip up, we stopped in St. George for some lunch at Chick-Fil-A and a visit to the temple.

I think the original plan was to just drive by it, but we got out and walked around for a bit. Which was nice, because the last time we were here was for the open house, and didn't get to walk around all that much with all the people.

The girls also thought the nativity was pretty cool.

They remembered the visitor's center from the last time we were here, and wanted to go explore again. We had a nice sister missionary show us a few things, and gave the girls a sticker and little photo of the temple.

She then played a short audio clip about Christ. It was kind of neat to see the girls sit still for it.

I asked Hadley to take our picture. She got us both in the frame, at least.

We got to Lake Havasu around dinnertime, as planned, and after some burgers at Culver's we made it to our hotel. After checking in we walked the short distance down to the bridge and the little village they have down by it. It was all lit up and festive. Everything had closed by this time, but it was still nice to walk around and enjoy it without too many people around.

One of the buildings had a snow machine shooting out bubbles that dropped like snow. The girls got a good kick out of that.

Emily wanted to make sure Crewe was able to enjoy it, too.

The girls loved seeing the lights, and would call out all the different colors as we walked around.

This was about the time Cambri was starting to feel a little under the weather. She was kind of lagging behind everyone a little.

The bridge looked pretty cool lit up, wreaths and all.

This whole area was right along the water with only a chain to prevent anyone from going in, so it became a little nerve wracking when the girls wanted to run around.

Back at the village, there was a sled with some reindeer setup for photos with Santa. The girls were excited to see him, and originally wanted to take their picture with him, but then chickened out at the very last.

On our walk back up to the hotel, Hadley and Harlow basically stopped at every decoration and requested a photo.

The next morning, after packing up and eating breakfast, we headed back down to the bridge again. There was hardly anyone around at this time, so it was perfect to setup the tripod and try and get some good pictures. We made sure to include the iconic red phone booth. Emily had ordered a gray onesie, but was sent a black one. So that kind of makes it hard to see.

And now that nobody was around, they had no problem hopping into Santa's sleigh.

We let Crewe out to walk around, but had to keep a close eye because he kept wandering towards the water.

We also made sure to get some pictures of them in the phone booth.

We then started for home, stopping in Twin Falls for the night before going the rest of the way on Wednesday.  It was A LOT of driving, but the kids and Emily were champs through it all. It may be weird that we would drive that far out of the way just for a photo, but it turned out to be a nice little addition to our Thanksgiving trip. The extra few days of driving weren't that bad.