Kaden Life Update #3

10/16/2017 12:00 PM, Kadan Westra wrote:

Hey Everyone, 

It's been a busy week!

The Fall colors are really setting in down in the valley now, and the SUU campus is full of trees, so it's really pretty right now. I love it. 

Tuesday evening was a mentoring night for entrepreneurs, and there were 5 mentors there to help answer any questions, and give advice. I talked with 4 of them, and gained some really good insights. It was a really good event, and it was really good of them to take some time to offer their value to us for free. 

After that, a friend from the entrepreneurship club and I drove up the canyon and up above the C on Cedar Mountain. It was the first time I'd been up there, and the city lights were awesome! You could see the starts fairly clearly as well. The only downside was it was a little cold. 

We ended up hanging out again on Thursday, which is when she showed me a video about an accelerated method of paying off a mortgage and avoiding ridiculous amounts of interest charges. (the same video I sent you, dad). Basically the idea is that you use a line of credit to pay off big chunks of your mortgage at a time. This allows you to pay off the mortgage much sooner than the loan term, and you save yourself from paying way more than your home is actually worth in the long run. Of course there is interest on the line of credit, but the point is that the line of credit has average daily interest, while the mortgage has a fixed rate, so you are saving money. You need to make enough to pay for all expenses each month, including the mortgage, along with the payment on the line of credit, but every time you build it back up, you max it and accelerate you mortgage a couple years just with one payment. I need to look into it some more, but it looks promising. 

That same day, Danny Cox, an old friend from Varsity All-Stars called me up and asked if I wanted to join him and his girl for a canyoneering trip. I accepted, and asked Christine (from the entrepreneurship club) to be my date. 

So Friday, after classes, we drove down to Birch Hollow, which is an 8 mile loop, with 12 rappels. Danny provided the gear, so I only had to buy gloves. It was really fun! We were stuck at one rappel for about an hour after a close call with almost getting the rope stuck. This put us behind schedule and we had to finish the last 3 rappels in the dark, which was pretty cool. 

However, there is not really a clear trail back out, so we ended up getting really lost, and we didn't have service, so Danny and I weren't sure how much we could trust our phone's location on the map. We bushwacked for a few hours, then realized we were moving so slowly that we weren't making in the right direction. It was getting cold, and we needed to keep moving to stay warm. The idea was brought up that we build a fire and wait for daylight. I was against this plan, because I knew it would get cold, and we didn't have any sleeping gear, so I proposed that we continue until around midnight and see if we can get on the right track (at this point we had decided to backtrack, and get back off the ridge and down in the ravine, then follow that up, because we knew it lead up the road eventually), and if we didn't feel like we were headed in the right direction then we could find a spot and camp out until morning. We got back down to the ravine and made better time climbing up it (thank goodness there was no water). We were able to tell that we were making progress towards the road, so we just kept going, and finally found the road a little after midnight. We turned on the heater, ate some food, said a prayer of thanks, and then drove home. It was almost 3 by the time we got back into Cedar City. It was quite an adventure! And a great double date, at that! 

Moral of the story. Download your google maps ahead of time.

Saturday afternoon (because we slept until noon), Derik, Christine, and I went to the temple in St. George for an endowment session, then got some food after. We ended up staying up late and watching Pirates 3 and 4 that night. One of our neighbors hasn't seen any of them, so we're trying to educate her. 

Anyway, the next few days down here look beautiful, and I'm excited to enjoy the weather! 

I gotta go! Institute starts in 1 minute! 

Have a great week yall!

Kadan Westra