This was a fun Gingerbread machine in Deseret Book downtown. It made the WHOLE STORE smell DELECIOUS!
We had a very sweet lunch at the Garden room restaurant on top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. It has become one of my new favorite lunch spots in the whole city. Its darling, and such a quaint place to dine for lunch. Their food is wonderful, and their dessert menu has everything imaginable. :) The best part is, it overlooks the SLC temple, and a lot of the city. It's beautiful! Thanks for taking us there Kim!
It's nice that Ster's parents live in very close proximity to everythinig downtown, because we just walked everywhere. LITERALLY. Everything we did was just a block or two away basically, and we had a great time. (Just bundle up...and you'll feel fine! Sterling teased Kim that she was trying to become an es"kim"o or something. She stayed warm though.)
One of the Coons family favorite restaurants is Bucca de Beppo's. It's a very scrumptious Italian place, and since my father in law went to Italy on his mission, he always orders a few different big platters for everyone to try, and we all just end up sharing bits of dinner. It's so much fun! :)
After dinner at Bucca's that Friday night, we headed off to the Jazz game! It was such a blast! The Jazz played really well, and actually WON!!! :D Ha. so it was definitely a game worth seeing! We found T-shirts at a really great deal (buy one, get one free...thanks to Ster) so they only cost us $10 a shirt. Normally we wouldn't have done it...but we figured it wasn't too bad of a deal, and after all...WE ARE AT THE JAZZ GAME!
We also got on the Jumbo-tron a few times! That was fun! The 1st time they showed us, I thoguht "shoot, I wish I had my camera" and so the 2nd time around... I was ready! (I just feel bad I accidentally cut off Sterling's face! :( oops!)
We had really great seats, and were pretty much on the floor. It was a fun game!
Saturday morning, Chris and Kim took us to some fun local market/shops downtown. We had a DELICIOUS Belgian waffle for breakfast (best I've ever tasted), and since it was getting close enough to lunch time, that same shop had really great sausage that was featured on Man Vs. Food. So OF COURSE Sterling and his dad had to try that out! ha!
He's the owner of the waffle shop! He's from Belgium and was the nicest guy ever!
Man Vs. Food dog!We went to a really fun Italian market, and EVERYTHING was authentic, imported from Italy. We saw these truffles there (they are like little mushrooms) that were literally $3,500 a pound. or $218.75 per ounce. They are really rare, and hard to find/grow properly...so they cost A FORTUNE!!! (wish I had some of those grownin' in my back yard! eh?) :)
Chris and Kim had some tickets to the musical "South Pacific" at the capitol theater, that they let us go see. It was WONDERFUL! That Bloody Mary cracks me up. We were wantin' to sing-along to a lot of the songs. I just love bein' able to hang out with my best bud! We do have a ton of fun together!
After the musical was done, we met Chris and Kim for dinner on Saturday night. They took us to a Restaurunt called "The Roof". It was to die for!!! It's a buffet on top of the Joseph Smith Memorial building, and it overlooks the temple. By going there for dinner, we got there just in time to see the sun setting in back of the temple! It was beautiful!!! The food was amazing, and I could just tell Sterling was in HEAVEN!!! We love spending time with our parents (both sets Jolley's and Coons') and feel like we could always hang out with them longer when we do get to spend time with them!
We left to come back to St. G on Sunday, so I didn't get any pictures of that day really. We had a really interesting time going to Chris and Kim's ward though. They have the most unique mixture in their ward, and it's so neat to see them all working together. Since they live right downtown, they have a lot of wealthy high rise apartments in their ward of retired couples (past mission presidents, general authorities, CEO's, etc.), a lot of U of U students (young married couple/families), and a few homeless shelters in their ward boundaries. It is quite the mixture, and it was great to see all these walks of life teaching and helping each other.
It was so much fun to spend the weekend up in SLC, but as always after a vacation...there is also a part of you that is just glad to be back home. :) Thanks for a great time Chris and Kim...and I'm so glad I got to spend a WHOLE WEEKEND with my husband...where we didn't do homework, work, or worry about "reality". ha!
