Our first apartment

A single student at BYU can live anywhere university approved, which means 1) buildings (not just apartments) will be segregated by gender and 2) there will be some minimum living standards the landlords are obligated to uphold to keep their approval status. And, of course, like anywhere, there's a good chance that your personal rent rate is going to be lower on your own than it would be if you were paying for the whole apartment.

The time came for Mom and relinquish their cozy singles contracts. Some of the apartments we checked out were scary. Others were pretty and pricey (and it doesn't have to cost much to be pricey for a couple of newlywed students, let me tell you). We finally settled on buying ourselves more time by starting out with a summer only contract at a complex that normally housed singles. It was near the campus and the Provo library. On Sundays, we only had to pass two other meeting houses to attend church at the chapel that Mom had lived in front of for the three years before that. Laundry was down three flights of stairs and across the street. The closest full service grocery store was about five or six blocks away. Doable, but we still liked it when people in the ward with cars took pity on us and let us go grocery shopping with them.

This was all in the days before we had a digital camera, but we did manage to find and digitize a little something from that era:

Farewell, fair Galant

When Mom & Dad got married, they had a car, a dark green Mitsubishi Galant that Grandma & Grandpa had given Dad since they would not be needing it while away on their mission in Russia. We had that car for seven days of our married life. It took us down to Los Angeles where we got on the boat for our honeymoon cruise and then waited patiently in the garage until we got back. It got us through the LA freeways and out of California. And then, just as we were entering Las Vegas, it crashed, with Mom driving. Everyone was able to walk away (although the driver in front of us was rather upset about her damaged car and sued us almost three years later, something the insurance took care of thankfully), and our insurance gave us a decent check for the value of the car, but that was the end of cars for us for a little over three years. Honestly, it turned out to all be a bit of a blessing in disguise, since we didn't really need a car as students with free bus passes living close to campus. Even when we moved to Seattle a couple of years later, we still didn't need a car, since Dad's job gave him a bus pass. At the time of the crash, the money we got was perfect for keeping the rent paid. Over the next few years, the lack of car saved who knows how many dollars in gas, maintenance, and insurance. Of course, things wouldn't have worked out as well without kind friends and good public transit. And, of course, when we did finally get a car again some three years (and two kids) later in Ohio, we were quite glad to have one. The new car? Another Galant, only white this time. Mom had to smile when Dad brought it home, thinking it was as if the previous car had returned to us "resurrected." This post is written several years after the fact in the wake of another car crisis. But, guess what? That "resurrected" Galant we got is still going strong and getting us through it, as of March 2010.