Missionary Shopping Trip

On Monday, February 18, we flew to Utah to shop for Joe’s mission clothes. Since Houston isn’t known for extreme cold, we started looking online for clothes. After checking out some websites, I liked the looks of the Missionary Mall, which offers a wonderful 2 yr guarantee on everything they sell. If anything wears out during normal missionary activities, all the elder has to do is send in a picture of the item and they will replace it for free. This even includes wiping out on your bike and tearing your pants. Hard to beat that. Although their website was good, we didn’t want to buy Joe’s mission clothes without letting him see them and trying them on first, so a trip to Utah was a must. What a blessing to have my flight benefits which made this trip possible.

We originally tried to fly out Sunday morning. However, our flight filled up at the last minute and all we ended up doing was spending a few hrs. at the airport. Luckily flying out Monday was a breeze, so the only thing it cost us was a night we planned to spend with the Stays. When we arrived in Salt Lake we were picked up by Grandpa Stay, who was going to loan us a car for our trip. After dropping him off at work, we headed to Provo. We spent the afternoon at Brett and Tonia’s house. Tonia and the boys were pulling in just as we got there. We helped them unload their groceries and headed inside. We soon discovered that Brett was home with the flu. Luckily he felt good enough to come chat with us (and none of us ended up catching what he had!). Sam and Cobe couldn’t wait for Joe to arrive. As soon as we entered the door, Cobe went downstairs to get the Wii turned on so Joe could play with them. It didn’t take long for Cobe to lose patience for Joe to come play, so he came up and got him. The three boys were happily occupied until dinner.


Tuesday was our shopping day. We headed right for the Missionary Mall. There were a couple of people already there, and only 2 salesmen so we wandered around for a while on our own. Once we had a salesman to help us, everything went smoothly. He went through the list with Joe and helped him select things that Joe was comfortable in. We ended up buying just about everything he needed there (and getting an idea for a great laundry bag that I made for about $25 less than they were selling it for).


All that was left was to have his suit pants hemmed. They took Joe's measurements and told us the pants should be done in a couple of hrs. Since we were heading to Salt Lake when we were done, we decided to grab some lunch, make a quick stop at the distribution center and then pick up the suits. Unfortunately the seamstress was called over to the Sister Missionary Mall, and unable to finish his pants when promised. This meant we'd have to return in the morning before we flew home. What a pain! We headed to Layton, had a great evening with the Stays and then drove back to Provo Wednesday morning. Luckily the traffic was no problem at all, and we were easily able to get there, return to Salt Lake for lunch and still be at the airport with plenty of time to spare. The biggest challenge was making all of our purchases fit into our carry on luggage. But in the end it did and the flight home went very smoothly.