Cemetary Hopping

For Memorial Day we visited several different cemetaries. Having spent some time at the floral last week, it was fun to see which pieces our shop had done and which pieces other florals had done. Obviously ours were superior to anything else!

We started the day off in SF at nephew Colton's grave. He hasn't had a lot of grass until recently, and I don't know what kind they used but it is definitely different than all the other grass in the cemetary, which is cool. There were already a lot of flowers on it. I wish I had thought to take the camera, but I didn't. Friends and family had stopped and left mementos and remembrances of him. It was all very beautiful.

Then we went to Grandma and Grandpa's graves. Keep in mind that these are Mike's grandparents on his mother's side, so I don't know a whole lot about the history and geneology here. Along the way we stopped and looked at various other people's headstones. My favorites are the old pioneer-y ones. Definitely cool.

Then we went over and looked at some original pioneer graves. Again, very cool as they had a photocopy of a restored old family photograph in a sheet protector on the grave, as well as having it marked with a colored flag.

After spending some time throwing pine cones at each other and walking around, we got back into our cars and drove to the next cemetary. We had 5 cars, and we parked every other parking space. It was quite funny, actually. Totally not done on purpose, either. We went and visited Grandma and Grandpa's graves, again Mike's grandparents on his father's side, along with Aunt B and Luanne, a family friend. Then someone brought up the bear. No, not Colton's bear, a GRIZZLY BEAR! There is an old headstone that says something about the person buried there, and then "Killed by a Grizzly Bear". It's actually pretty cool that they say that. Unfortunately, it is really old and you can barely read it.

Again, we threw some pine cones and visited other graves before hopping back in our cars. At this point, we are FREEZING because it is cold and windy and rainy, and half of us were dumb and didn't bring jackets or umbrellas or anything. We drove on down to P-town's cemetary where we visited Max. We also saw the graves of Daniel Stark and his three wives. They came to Utah on the Brooklyn many many many years ago. The Brooklyn was the pioneer ship that sailed from New York to San Fransisco, and I believe it had to go all the way around South America. It was really neat to see the graves, because they made mention of the fact that they were on the Brooklyn.

As we were looking for Daniel Stark's actual buriel site (he has a monument by two of his wives, and is buried on the completely other side of the cemetary with his third wife), I asked Mike where Orange Horatio was. See, when we had Marshy, he wanted to name him Orange. I said no. "But Orange Horatio is a family name!" was his argument. I stuck with No. Anyway, I've kind of always wanted to see the grave. No one really knew where exactly it was, and we were again freezing our bums off in the cold wind and rain.

We threw some more pine cones, almost hitting a few old ladies who definitely did NOT belong to our family, and hopped back in our cars. We had one last cemetary to go to: Benji! The Benji cemetary is really really little. Like, one road little. We got out, saw the monument, walked to the graves and then ran back to the cars. By this point we had gone from 5 to 2 vehicles. Yes, 3 cars wussed out and went home.

All in all, it was a pretty fun trip. I hadn't actually been to a cemetary on Memorial Day since I was probably 16 or 17. My mom's family is either in Wyoming or Emery County, Utah. My dad's family is mostly up in Southern Idaho, so no matter what we have quite the lengthy drive to get there, and it requires a lot of planning and stuff.