united nations

Anybody who knows H and me will be entirely unsurprised to hear that we have gotten a big monthly calendar which we have hung on the wall in the mudroom and which we continually update with all the things there are to do around here.  Not the hiking, but the culture type stuff like soccer or football games, REI sales, small town festivals, live music, special exhibitions, etc.  The goal is not to necessarily do everything on the calendar, but we always want to know what our options are so we never sit around saying, "Gosh, what should we do now?"

Last weekend was a case in point.  After all the after the going in to work and the weeding and the bike riding and the saving of kittens and cyclists on Saturday, we still couldn't go hiking because of a 20% chance of thunderstorms here in the valley.  Captain Mike told us that if there's any percentage chance of inclement weather in the valley, then there will definitely be inclement weather in the mountains.  And we listen to Captain Mike (who, by the way, we're hoping will soon take us back up to the very first real hike we did out here last fall in the Uintas because he says the wildflowers there are just incredible).  Since we couldn't risk going hiking, we took a look at our calendar and found: a Samoan festival in a West Valley City park; and a Peruvian festival in a Centerville park.  These were my submissions to the calendar, obviously, each promising food, music, crafts and lots of people. 

H being a good sport, we slathered on the sunscreen, set the GPS and headed off to Centennial Park in WVC.  We found the park - a big one, with a waterpark, great ballfields and a huge rec center - but no Samoan festival.  Nothing, nada, not even a banner*.  Hmph.  Luckily, we knew from our calendar about that Peruvian festival and off we went to Centerville (a suburban town a little bit north of SLC).  We found that park and lo and behold, there were some actual festivities: about four people in traditional costume (traditional Peruvian incorporates day-glo colors?) thinking about doing a dance, some limp empanadas and a bucket of chicha, and some extremely sedate festival goers sprawled under any shade trees they could find.  Perhaps we missed the fun and raucous part of the festival - we were there at the very tail end of it, afterall - but what we found wasn't really doing it for us.  At least this one actually existed.

Sunday was much the same weather-wise and we opted out of hiking again.  But we did consult the calendar and then head up to Snowbird for some free bluegrass music at the Mountain Music Festival.  Sitting on a stone wall in the wonderful sunshine, drinking 24-oz. PBR tallboys (and kicking ourselves for not having brought our own cooler as they were clearly allowed), and listening to The Badly Bent, a bluegrass band out of Durango, Colorado ... it doesn't get much better than that.  It might have taken a while for us to find it, and what we did end up with was all-American, but we did manage to come up with some culture that weekend.

* BTW: the newspaper reprinted the blurb about the Samoan festival again this week, this time giving the dates as July 14-17.  Might have been nice to have gotten it right the first time, folks.