January 2020 - Reunion & ski fun

The 5th day into the new year Hendrik came back home! I'm sure for him it felt more like leaving home, because he just cannot wait to return back to Belgium for good 😏, but I know all of us were really happy to be together as a family again!
But before that exciting moment would happen, we first had another visitor from Belgium passing by for an unexpected visit! Philip, a friend of ours from Meulstee, had some meetings in Utah & California, and would be staying at our place during the weekend.

He already visited us during the summer of 2018 with his family, but this time he would be able to experience why they call the Utah snow 'The greatest snow on earth'. Utah’s license plates are even marked with a skier and this slogan, so it must be true! 😉

Apparently the best powder skiing is not found in the lightest snow, but rather in snow with enough 'body' (without being too wet and heavy) to provide good flotation.The Utah average snow density is 8.5% which falls right in between the 4%-14% which is considered to be the ideal water percentage to have that perfect snow. This graphic below, explains how we get this density:

This is how these dendrites look in real life:

And this is what skiing in powder snow looks like. The first one is Hendrik, followed by Willem:

Lucky us, I know!😊
Philip definitely enjoyed the ski experience on the slopes, ánd the tailgating experience off the slopes!

 

 

While Philip was still with us, Hendrik arrived. Since it would not have been appreciated by our oldest son, and honestly it didn't even cross my mind to do it, I have no pictures of him when he arrived. I do have a picture showing that at some point his plane was exactly next to our car though 😏 (Hendrik is in the red plane, we are in the blue dot) .

The next morning Philip left for his meetings at Salt Lake City and California, and  I took Hendrik to his favourite breakfast place ... where I díd take a picture 😊.

As it was the 6th of January, Epiphany day, we had a dinner party at our place that night to treat our international friends here with some Belgian delicacies like 'Belgian endives soup' aka 'Witloofsoep', 'Flemish stew with homemade Belgian fries' aka 'Stoofvlees met frietjes', and the '3 Kings cake' aka '3 Koningen taart'. It was at the same time the opportunity for Hendrik to catch up with his Dutch friend Milan.

A new day later, Philip returned from California, and we had one last fun evening together before he headed back to Belgium.

 

Hendrik would only return to school on January 21st (start 2nd semester), so we were able to have some quality time with him. We had our postponed Christmas party, we went skiing and hiking, Geert took him to an NBA game, and we also had a ski weekend to Sun Valley in Idaho with some friends.

Late Christmas party

Ski fun

Hike fun with just the 2 of us  

The anthem, played before each NBA game

The Sun Valley crew

Ski fun @ Sun Valley

 

 

 

Geert filming Hendrik skiing through his legs

The boys practicing their jumps at the house ... boys will be boys

 

Best spot to warm those cold & sore mussels (and inner soul 😏)  after a day of skiing 

In front of the house right before heading back home

And slowly but surely he adjusted again to the 'relaxed' dress code we know here in Utah. 😆

Dressing (up) to pick up Willem is overrated 🙄

Dress code to go the the movies here:PJs and a blanket

With Hendrik being home, I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, so I skipped on most activities with the spouses, but I díd have one fabulous lunch with the ladies @ Gamze's place. Based on the food that Gamze prepares each time, I think I want to move to Turkey next ... or maybe she's just a great cook, but man o man do I love all these Turkish recipes!!

The rest of the month was filled with some more ski and tailgate fun ❤️.