February 2017 - Belgium meets Belgium meets Seattle in Utah

In February 2017 we had another visitor from Belgium. This time a colleague/friend of Geert with whom he had been deployed for 4 months in Afghanistan back in 2014.

Geert had to work during the 2 weeks she stayed with us, and the kids had school, so I showed her around. 

She's a good skier and sporty girl 💪, so it was no problem to find fun activities to do with her, here in outdoor Utah!

So, we went skiing of course. Sometimes just the two of us ... 

 

Other times we joined up with some of the ladies of the international community ...

And during the weekend we skied together with Geert and the kids ...

Except skiing, we also did some hiking. We hit the Donut Falls Trail, which is a short and easy hike close to Salt Lake City with a beautiful waterfall in a cave at the end. The weather was gorgeous, everything was covered with a thick layer of snow and we were all by ourselves, making it a truly beautiful hike. 

The easy rating only counts until you get to the waterfall by the way. If you want to hike up there (which we tried), forget about the 'easy' ... man o man, 'did we see our pears' as we would say back home 😂 ... and for the non-Flemish readers ... we suffered!! But while suffering we sure had some fun!

No visitor of ours can escape a visit to Antelope Island, and with Yannick that was not different. We did the usual tour by car, made some stops at the gorgeous view points, and also visited the only, old and abandoned ranch on the island, which has been turned into a (free of charge) 'museum'.

View from the island on the Wasatch mountains

Taken from inside the barn of the ranch

From there we decided to make a little hike, as we saw a big group of bisons further up, and an up close and personal view of some bisons is definitely also on our visitors must do's check list. 😏  

Although the bisons on Antelope Island live there in the wild, I've always had the feeling that they are kind of used to its human visitors and they don't seem to be bothered by us. But during this visit, we noticed immediately that they were agitated ... running, fighting each other ... like nothing we've ever seen before.

Now you need to understand that bisons are known to attack people (Bison attack in Yellowstone) and although they seem slow, they definitely can outrun humans; they have been observed to run as fast as 40 mph (64 km/hr)! 😳

So with that in mind we started to feel pretty uncomfortable when we got surrounded by several 'agitated' bison herds who were moving into our direction!

We don't have any pictures from when they were closer, because for some bizarre reason none of us thought of doing this at that moment 🤔

Waiting until they left didn't seem to be a good idea as they were only getting closer to us, so we left the path and slowly but surely got some safer distance between us, and by the time we got back to our car, my legs (almost) didn't tremble anymore and we could all laugh about our little 'adventure' ...

... we Belgians are just not used to being confronted with wild animals that can actually hurt us badly. Geert always tells the Americans 'the most dangerous animal we have in Belgium is a squirrel', and probably he's not even that far off! 😂

Once in the car heading back home, a thunderstorm broke and we all wondered whether that was the reason why they were all so agitated?

Jennifer and Maikel, 2 good friends of Yannick, flew over from their hometown Seattle (Washington State) to meet up with Yannick. We proposed they also stayed at our place and so off we went again to Antelope island (as I said, nobody escapes that visit when staying at our place! 😬). This time without Geert, and as all of them were in for a good hike, I took them up to 'Frary Peak' ... the highest point on Antelope Island. 

It's a strenuous hike of 11km with an elevation gain of 712 meters, so a great work-out and on top of that you're treated with magnificent views to all directions of the Salt Lake throughout the whole hike. 

 

The last 3 kms of the trail were mostly covered with snow, but luckily I had crampons (think of them as snow chains for shoes ) with me for everybody.

The final km to the top has some serious drop offs and this, in combination with the slippery trail conditions was enough for me, with my fear of heights, to chicken out. Yannick decided to keep me company while Jennifer and Maikel continued to the top 👊🏻. They said the view up there is just amazing, so I'll definitely need to give it another try when the conditions are more in my favour 😏.

Although not everybody made it all the way to the top, we all felt satisfied with what we'd done! 💪🏻

As the hike to Adam's canyon was such a success when I did it with my parents back in December (December 2016), I decided to do it again with them, and Geert joined too this time. Although there wasn't as much snow as in December, and the waterfall wasn't frozen anymore, there were still some challenging parts and the waterfall is just beautiful in any form. 

 

And of course after all that skiing and hiking, you just get so thirsty!! 😜

 

 

February is also our wedding anniversary month, and in 2017 it was we're married 15th years. Yannick stayed home with our boys and we celebrated it at 'Log Haven', a very secluded and romantic (ánd expensive 😅) restaurant within Millcreek Canyon.

Although Utah doesn't celebrate carnaval in February like we do in Belgium, we did get an opportunity to dress up 👏🏻. At the end of February, when Yannick was already back in Belgium, we participated to a quiz on base with the Belgium team. Each participating team needed to have a theme, and we decided to go as Vikings ... with this fantastic group picture as a result 😁

Perfect way to end February.