With Dallin's stepdad being a pilot and his sister Brie needing to build her flight hours, it was easy enough to convince the family that they should fly his younger sister Hanna up to Utah.  The very morning that Rachel and Dick left for Alaska, Dallin's family flew up just long enough for a quick breakfast before dropping Hanna off for a week to hang out. 

While she was in town we visited one of the local summer festivals for strawberries and cream and, for Dallin and Hanna at least, carnival rides.  We tried out the bakery next to me and Dallin's new apartment.  While Dallin worked, Hanna and I shopped and visited the poppy fields and the aquarium.  Hanna wants to be an interior designer, but she can also appreciate exterior design and "needs to be rich one day," so we had fun driving around rich neighborhoods a few times. 

A big highlight of the week was visiting Mount Timpanogos Cave.  We had gone to the national forest for a quick "hike" in the woods and hadn't realized the cave museum was nearby. When we stopped in and found out the cave had just been reopened, we immediately booked tickets for the next day.  I had been wanting to visit for years but it was always either booked out or closed for months on end.  

The 1.5 mile hike was a lot more challenging than it sounded, especially with the zigzag trail straight up the mountain.   For a pregnant girl, it was a lot, but the cave tour made it absolutely worth it.  We trekked through a series of three caves, the first of which was badly damaged in the late 1800s by thought its stalagmites and stalactites would be worth a pretty penny.  The most impressive and best-preserved cave was the last, Timp Cave, which hosts thousands of twisting and twirling little stone structures making their slow crawl from the walls.  The paths were very narrow, and I tried not to bump my head (or my belly) against the rock. Dallin and I had to laugh as we thought about our trip to Neuschwanstein last year--turns out the cave room in that castle did an excellent job imitating the appearance natural caves.  We just couldn't decide if the fake cave looked realistic or the real cave looked fake!