Well, we did it. We drove to Arizona for a glorified book signing, and we made it back - alive and with our dignity mostly intact.
The trip was absolutely amazing. We drove down through rain and snow and dark of night right (listening to the Twilight and Eclipse
playlists, naturally) after I got out of class on Friday, and on Saturday morning we got up bright and early to go kayaking with our dear friend Chelsea Walker, who inadvertently gave us the name for our expedition. There was a sticky note in her car that said "
teamestrogen.com" at the bottom... well, we were there because we were in love with a fictional vampire, so it seemed to fit.
After a stop at In-N-Out for lunch and a few minutes at the Mesa temple, we went back to our hotel for some major primping. I did almost nothing toward getting myself ready - Jennie curled my hair,
Lili put my hair up, and Lauren did my makeup. I read
The English Patient throughout the process in a futile attempt to not get any further behind in my school work.
We were all feeling a little silly when we went to the prom, but we pulled up and saw several middle-aged ladies in frilly dresses and we started to feel better. Then we found out that there were girls there from Canada and
Los Angeles, New York and even London - well, driving down from Provo didn't seem like much of a stretch.
Stephenie Meyer was there and read the first chapter of
Eclipse to us (it was hard to hear, but luckily we also got a couple of copies of the special edition of
New Moon, so at dinner afterwards we read it to each other.) Stephenie told us that she realized that most of us had come to the prom stag, so she brought some options for us for prom pictures. Then she proceeded to introduce us to Edward and Jacob. Amazing. The actors couldn't quite live up to our expectations of course, but it was definitely enough to get all of those girls squealing.
There was supposed to be dancing at the prom, and there was music - everything from Muse to Crowded House to the Beach Boys - but there was no dancing. So we danced anyway and had a blast, and I'm pretty sure everyone else wished they could be as cool as we were.
The drive home was beautiful - we could see so much more of the gorgeous desert in the light (
haha) and we stopped at Glen Canyon Dam to take some dam pictures.
We got home in time for ward prayer and got all kinds of crap for what our guy friends perceive as our "problem" (several offers were made for aid in forming a self-help group) but we didn't care. We knew it was geeky, but it was also fantastically fun, and why would we miss out on something so amazing just because we get funny looks when we say we drove 10 hours to get to a book signing?
This is one for the record books.
For your view pleasure, a few pictures from our expedition:
Trying to entertain ourselves in the car for several hours was a hard job
Well, they didn't want their noses to get sunburned on the river...
In-N-Out = amazing, and so does Chelsea for carting us around Gilbert and Mesa
This is scary business. Ah, the price of beauty.
But wasn't it worth it?
Getting my books signed by Stephenie Meyer!
Can't . . . wait . . . for August . . .
Yeah, everyone else wishes they were this cool.
Yay for the
spinny dress!
Showing off our nail/making butterfly motions.
And we basically destroyed our room.
I saw this street on the way to the prom . . . we couldn't resist the photo op.
A dam picture. It was really hard to smile for this because we were looking right into the dam sun.
There are SO many more amazing pictures, but this gives you a pretty good overall view of our trip. Sadly, I don't have one of me falling into the Salt River, but I'm sure what you can imagine is better.
We may be some sort of crazy (thanks Blue October) . . . but I like us.
I'm done. I really can't say anything about what I thought without giving something away, but to the fangirlies still out there reading it -
