Our SVU Getaway

Nestled in the mountains of southern Virginia is a beautiful little school called SVU.

  Gorgeous, right?

Andrew and I especially loved this statue.

Some people call SVU the BYU of the east because it has similar standards and teaching methods. But it's A LOT smaller.  Well, every year they host an education conference and invite awesome Mormon speakers.

How have we not heard about this for the last ten years???

When we DID hear about it, Andrew and I really wanted to figure out a way to get there.  OK, I really wanted to get there and I hoped Andrew would come along.  Things like this are NOT easy to swing when your nearest immediate family member lives two thousand miles away.  So....that's when you turn to friends.  I was able to work out a kid-swap for the weekend with Chris and Tiffany.  Woo hoo! It was close to our anniversary, so we decided to call it an anniversary getaway.

Andrew and I celebrated our 16 years of wedded bliss...

in a dorm room.

With twin beds.

Sooooo romantic. :)

The first couple speakers were a total infomercial to convince us to send our kids, grandkids, and neighbor's kids to SVU.  I was beginning to wonder what I'd gotten us into.  After that, the rest of the conference was wonderful.  We were spiritually fed.  We heard from Julie Beck, Marlin Jensen, Ron Bartholomew (Andrew's seminary teacher in jr. high) and others.  We listened to beautiful performances on the piano and violin as well as vocalists.

 And we got to watch "Babes in Arms," a cheesy but fun musical play.  Well, Andrew watched most of the play.  He got called out in the second act by Chris letting us know that Brandon had split his lip open pretty bad on the trampoline and did we want him to get stitches.  (Convenient that our dentist friend was watching him.) These decisions are not easy based on cell phone photos alone, but we decided against the stitches.  I *think* it was the right call.

During our breaks, we'd sneak out to these chairs and soak up the sun for a minute. We were trying to pretend we were on a cruise.  Didn't last long, though.  :)

I'm still trying to decide if I want this to become an annual tradition. Sitting in metal folding chairs for hours on end is ROUGH on Andrew's back.  And we had to miss the kids' last day of school, which was OK this year, but some years that won't work.  I guess we'll see how it works out next year.