Daddy, Papa and Me

We went to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City Utah for one day :). The festival is really nice here in Southern Utah, in fact it's won a Tony for best regional theater. And you can't beat the location... Bryce Canyon, Zion's, Escalante, etc all in quick trip distance. Someday we'll have to make it a long vacation instead of a quick one day trip.

Anyway we saw Shakespeare's Coriolanus first while Emma played at the playplace (childcare is provided cheaply). Well, not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I can see why they haven't staged this play in 40 years here. Enjoyable, but nothing like most of his other plays I've seen. Still, the acting was great and it was a good time. Then we saw Thornton Wilder's play: Matchmaker. That was well acted and hilarious. The play has an interesting history and "Hello Dolly" was based on it. The play is better than Hello Dolly :). We thoroughly enjoyed it.

We also go to spend an hour in a question and answer session with two of the actors from Matchmaker. One of the great things of this festival is all the side-things going on, discussions with actors, literary discussions, Thursday night caberets, etc, etc. We almost took Emma to one of the plays this year, but decided to way to next year (when she is 6.. that's the official age the festival puts as minimum :).

Utah was hitting triple-digit temperatures over the weekend. Luckily, Cedar City is a high elevation so the temperatures there were only around 96 :). Apparently though, Utah recorded it's HIGHEST temperature ever at 118 over the weekend, in St. George. I find that only a little ironic since Guy has a relative there who flatly denies the reality of global warming... and they now live in the location of the highest recorded temperature ever :)... anyway...

We drove to Provo (Guy's parents live there) Saturday evening, a 3 hour trip. Well, 3 hours on a normal day.

As we got about 30 minutes outside of Cedar City the highway became a parking lot. For the next 2 hours we sat in our car as the traffic inched (I mean inched) forward.

It was about 100 degrees outside.

Our air conditioner stopped working.

We opened the windows and put up some sun blocks.

Cars started to overheat and pull over to the side.

We finally got to a place where we found out what was going on, they closed the highway and were diverting traffic far to the East. A wildfire was raging over Utah, the largest the state has yet to see. It took another 4 hours to get home by detour.

We almost ran out of gas. The first station we stopped at (on a small state road, 89) had huge lines. We finally found (about 20 miles later) a station that had a not-so-bad line at the gas pump.. but you should have seen the bathroom line!

The owners of the station said they have never had such good business.

We could smell the fires raging to the west even though they were miles and miles away.

Emma was a great sport (luckily she had some audiobooks we got from a Wendy's kid's meal :D). There were also a lot of good people, the nice people in the bathroom lines who decided the women's line was too long (Guy was one of those nice people) who decided to make both bathroom's coed for the day, the nice people passing out free bottled water at the exit to the detour, etc.

If the world ends by fire, well... they'll be nice to you in Utah :).

Sunday we went to see Ratatouille. We saw it in Kamas Utah. It was a theater showing an early show. Kamas is a small mountain town (of about 1,200 people). We drove up to the theater. It had one screen and was very small. Barely a sign. I had Guy go in to ask if they had air conditioning. Seriously, it didn't look like they would and it was 100 degrees outside!

He came back outside and said that the theater owner said they had an 'old-fashioned' air conditioning... high grass in the back of the theater they wet down and then blow fans on.

I was sure she was kidding and being facetious because we had to ask. Guy said it felt cool inside, so we went in to see the movie. The theater owners were really friendly, loved Emma and we had a very pleasant conversation before the movie.

As we sat down, the owner came to tell us how the cooling system works. She wasn't kidding earlier. The theater was built about 60 years ago. In the back they have grass growing which they wet down on hot days. Large fans then blow air across the wet grass and into ducts that go under and into the theater... cooling it off, kind of a 'swamp cooler.'

What will they think of next?

Oh, btw, Ratatouille was EXCELLENT. We loved it (though the rats running around in the restaurant did make me a bit squeamish and Emma made me sit back in the back of the theater because some of the scenes were a bit tense ... she is a bit sensitive.. we left Chicken Little because it scared here, but she stayed through this movie and loved it).

Well, that was our weekend, how was yours? :)