That Time We Did The Parade of Homes and a Ghost Tour

This weekend has been pretty eventful so far. We've started the Utah Valley Parade of Homes this week, our first Parade of Homes ever. I've heard some pretty cool things about these things, but I've never been. Now that we are building I thought it would be a good idea to check it out to get decoration ideas. So far I've been super impressed with how big the houses can get and how much they can put in them, but as far as decorations I haven't seen anything that I've loved a lot. However, we did see a house with like 2 or 3 basements...didn't know that was possible. It had this huge basketball court and this glass overlook thing that was a bar. That was on day one and I was blown away. Of course I didn't realize that was kind of the point of the parade. There was another one with a foam pit and a bowling alley (what?!), that one had an amazing pool with a slide and a pool house I wish we could fit into our new backyard.

Even though these were homes I knew we'd never be able to afford (while I usually hate that phrase or attitude, I can admit they are amazing, but I have no idea what I'd do with all that space. Especially for just two of us) I did find features that I did think would be cool to incorporate into our home. I'm loving the tall ladders with the book cases (a la Beauty and the Beast). Larry found a fish tank he'd love to put into the house (I'm surprisingly okay with having one). Making the space under the stairs into something cool was another idea I was interested in adding in our home and I also love looking at the different theater rooms they have, especially since I hope to have one in our future basement. Here's to hoping I can find a way to make some of these things work.

Now onto the best part of the weekend...our first ghost tour. I had heard of this company, Grimm's Ghost Tour, a while back and knew I wanted to do a tour with them. Unfortunately, I didn't think of it last Halloween so I figured we would do it later this year. Well we started talking about it at work and a small group of us decided it would be a fun night out. We went to dinner at Lucky 13 before the tour where I got the worlds spiciest burger...it was awful! Larry got a foot tall burger and everyone was really impressed with how much he could eat. Dinner went into overtime so we ended up running late getting to the tour spot so we all had to high tail it to the bus stop...that was probably my least favorite part of the night, but I promise it got better from there.

The tour we did was the SLC Cemetery tour where they walk us through the cemetery and tell the stories of the graves (I had no idea they were so old up there). It wasn't exactly what I thought a ghost tour would be, it was more historical fact than ghost hunting, but we all had these EMF's and mine kept going off like crazy. There was this spot between these two trees that it went insane! I wish I had had a real camera to get some good pictures to see if I see anything, but I only had my phone. I'm hoping to do another one and take a real camera and maybe a voice recorder. They said you can get some crazy things on recorders if you take them with you.

So while it wasn't as spooky as I was expecting, it was still really cool. For being so early in the year the weather was pretty overcast so it was perfect. We almost got to do the Ted Bundy tour (where you go see his old cellar up Emigration Canyon), but then it ended up getting booked so we couldn't, but we all decided that would be a good next one with more people. Everyone seemed to love going to the one we did so it ended up being a great night out.