Season 10 Greattasticly Ever After Blog 9: Summer Long Honeymoon, Part 2: Park City

 Summer Long Honeymoon, Part 2: Park City

My parents' college best friends, Ron and Anita Wallace, own a condo (or maybe it’s a timeshare) in Park City Utah. The condo is part of a larger resort called Canyon Village. While Paige and I were dealing with wedding planning stress, we were also stressing about planning the honeymoon, as that would be the next big thing. Mom told Anita about this back in January, and she offered up their condo as our place to stay. Note- Anita put me as her nephew on the reservation, which isn’t untrue we definitely do have that kind of relationship. But I also wanted to thank Ron and Anita for letting us stay here! We are very appreciative!

Also, just kinda a random thought that I feel like should be mentioned. Before I was dating Paige (and “my wife” was just an imaginary concept) I imagined my honeymoon as being in an all inclusive resort in Hawaii. I think that’s because a Hawaiian honeymoon is like the basic package, if that makes sense. It didn’t require any extra work to conjure up the setting. I knew that an all inclusive resort was unrealistic so the fact that we actually got a mostly inclusive resort is crazy.

Day 1: 

At 3:30 am, on Wednesday July 8th, Paige and I woke up, after going to bed at 12:00, and we finished packing. Mom dropped us off at the airport at 5:30 for our 7:30 flight and we landed in Salt Lake City at 9:00 am local time (11:00 Columbus time). We ate lunch at the airport and ordered our Lyft to the condo. 

We arrived at Canyon Haus (pronounced house), at 11:45 and we were able to check in at noon. Unfortunately there was an issue with the WiFi and making the key cards so we kind of got trapped in the room, but with the lack of sleep the night before (and the “ghost hours” on the plane) the rest was nice. And I was able to leverage the situation to get Nespresso pods for us to get through the whole trip. 

Because of the WiFi we struggled to order the groceries for the week and by the time we got it ordered it wouldn’t arrive until the 9th at 3:00 pm. We went out to a Mexican restaurant called Dos Olas Cantina, which was really good; no Habanero’s, but still good. After we ate we walked back through the resort narrowly missing a mountain storm. 

Day 2: 

We got up the next day at 8:30 am, made our coffees, showered and then by 10:00 we were heading out to a restaurant called The Umbrella Bar, which we had discovered on our way to Dos Olas. Unfortunately it didn’t open till 12:00  so we went to a local shop to get a few things that we couldn’t order. Our GPSs were not being very helpful so we ended up sneaking through another hotel to get there before returning to The Umbrella Bar at 12:25. 

After we ordered our food I asked the bartender, Kendra, “so we’re on our honeymoon,” 

“Congratulations,” she said. 

“Thank you,” I continued, “do you have any suggestions for what we should do?” 

We returned to the room after we ate and waited for our groceries. Once they arrived around 3:45, we put them away and I started to make a PB&J. I toasted the bread (a habit I picked up from Paige), but I wasn’t used to the toaster… so I set off the smoke alarm. 

Once we rectified that problem and I ate (Paige was still full from lunch), we went down to the pool and then as Paige showered, I went to the steam room. I’ve never been in a steam room before… that was very cool. As soon as the steam turned on the room was completely filled within 30 seconds; it was almost like a sensory deprivation tank. 

Day 3: 

On July 10th, I got up early, went downstairs and wrote a little bit on my phone, until Paige called me when she woke. I went upstairs, we got ready then packed everything up for the day. At 11:15 we made it to the red pine gondola check-in. Five minutes later after we had gotten our tickets and signed the waivers, we headed up the mountain. The map they had given us at check-in was a bit confusing, and once we arrived it became even more so. All of the trails were very poorly labeled, since it was a ski resort and hiking is not the main purpose of this mountain.  We went on a few botched hikes before we went down to a ski lodge at 12:30 to eat the sandwiches we had made. 

Kendra had told us that Alpine Lake was a good hike. After we ate we made our way to try to find the Alpine Lake Trail. On one of our failed hikes we had believed that we were on the mid mountain trail. We finally found a sign that led us to the Alpine Lake Trail, and after a while it split in two. One path led to Alpine Lake and the other was the Mid Mountain Trail. We used Siri to flip a coin and ended up at Alpine Lake. 

Anita had told us that there was free, live music before we left and Kendra had directed us to something called concerts on the slopes. On our way down, Paige and I saw a band setting up on a stage. I looked it up but tickets were way too expensive. That night after we had dinner, we went back out to explore the resort at night. The area was kind of dead because of the concert, and so I asked Paige, “do you wanna get ice cream?” She said yes and we looked around for a shop, but there were none in the area. Luckily we got a couple of ice cream sandwiches at the local grocery store. As we walked out of the store. We heard a different band playing around Dos Olas. Excited, we ran in that direction and watched them play into the night. 

To Be Continued…