Salt Lake City was bitter sweet. We were excited to spend a few days with good friends, and sad as it marked the end of our time in the US.

A benefit of all the great Stampin’ Up! trips that Deb has earned over the years are all the friends we have made around the world. And often we only get a chance to catch up briefly on trips or observe each other’s lives via social media. So to get a chance to hang out for a few days with no other distractions has been really special.

So over the last few days Deb and Pam have been stamping up a storm, hanging out at the Stampin’ Up! home office, shopping, and just generally chilling and chatting.

And while the ladies were having a huge time, Chris and I have kept ourselves largely out of trouble.

We spent time tinkering with his bandit to get it going and then we went out riding.

We’ve been out bike, car and truck shopping. Sorry you can have your Mustangs its a Dodge Challenger for me.

And I was wondering if my garage would fit one of these…

Or one of these Polaris Slingshots… only because convertibles seem too boring and have too much storage.

And sitting in the side-by-sides brought back memories of racing and these seemed a lot of fun – so I got out quickly before any ideas took root.

We checked out a couple of the big outdoor stores in Salt Lake City – Scheels and Cabelas. While both of these are outdoors stores specialising in camping, fishing and hunting equipment it was amazing the contrast between the stores. Scheels felt like a big outdoors department store which included hunting equipment, while Cabelas felt very much like a hunting store that also had outdoor equipment. I have to say that Cabelas took me a bit by surprise with the level of weaponary openly on display – it was quite in-your-face and not something we see or expect in Australia.

We also visited a specialist knife dealer. While I’m not an avid knife collector I do have a few that I have collected over the last few years and I regularly like looking at knives. So it was nice to go and have a look at a specialist knife shop and see what they have access to in the US. There are certainly a lot of really nice knives – however many of the ones I was looking at aren’t something that I could bring into Australia as their action is illegal. For example there were a number of front loading knives – for those who don’t know what a front loading knife is – here is a quick video I took of one I was looking at.

Yikes.! Needless to say I didn’t purchase one of those…

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And just when we thought our US adventure was over, our plane couldn’t land at Salt Lake City due to storms and the delay meant putting our connection to our Melbourne flight at risk so the airline gave us the option to risk the connection in LA (only giving us 30 minutes to move between domestic to international at LAX) and possibly get caught up at LA for 24 hours or delay the trip home for 24 hours and hang out in Salt Lake City for another day. So after a quick call Chris was back at the airport picking us and all our gear back up. Then as we walked in the house my phone bleeped with a notification of an additional 30 minute delay.

Good call.

I had to smile – in a Facebook post in response to our forced 24 hour delay I said “It’s official, the US loves us and wants us to stay” my daughter replied “I love you more, come home”.

So we received a bonus day in Salt Lake City.

And then as we were getting ready for our second attempt to leave Salt Lake City another storm front rolls through with more flooding, hail, and severe winds. This was what the sky looked like at 5:30pm as we left for the airport – and we were heading into the black.

But as our flight time rolled around the storms parted and we were on our way home … albeit 24 hours later.

A quick shout out for the hospitality of our US friends Chris and Pam it was great to hang out with you guys for a few days. It was certainly one of our trip highlights.

And after 3 flights and 18.5 hours in the air we are home…