BYU

BYU Dropoff

Paul Rydell

26 Sep 2025 • 4 min read

Frances started BYU in August, 2025. We dropped off Eddie at BYU in August of 2020 and Covid made it a pretty lame experience. Obviously I was quite sad to be saying goodbye to Frances but it was nice to have a non-covid experience so I could become a bigger fan of BYU.

Trip notes:

We drove to Utah earlier in the summer so didn't feel the need to make another road trip. And Breeze flights from SNA to PVU are amazing. Eddie came with us so we could check all the bags without paying exorbitant fees.

Landed in Provo and headed over to Heritage to move in.

Heritage halls. Rain stayed away and we got her moved in with just a few trips from the car.

Dads should keep themselves busy on move-in day by building the furniture. I built this shoe rack. The drawer faces were fabric that looked like wood. Funny.

I also built the bedside table. Plenty to keep me busy.

RA installed door decorations so all the roommates can show how they feel. Frances says she hasn't changed hers off of Green. :)

Fat Daddy's pizza in provo. Very good! Rating: 5/6

Rented a mountain bike at BYU Outdoors Unlimited. Great bikes, service, and prices!

Made it to the abandoned train and checked it out.

Swig and Mo' Bettahs. I love Provo food!

Frances scheduled a time for us to go to the Provo City Center temple. Very nice.

Took a tour with Eddie of his research lab.

Kari and Frances finished the dorm room. Shoe rack in use. Sunflower decoration as an homage to Kari's sunflower decorations at UCLA apartment almost 30 years ago.

Ice cream from the Creamery. This is actually not coffee icecream. It just tastes just like it. I think they use maple flavor to simulate a coffee flavor. Review: 7/8

Orientation day. Lively entertainment & then a more spiritual presentation.

Some parents gathered in the stadium to watch the students form a big Y. It took them over 90 minutes to form up.

Drone show featuring Brigham Young made out of drones. This made me laugh.

The whole week obviously reminded me of the back to school essay that Rich Galen would publish each year:

The children of America are going back to school. And, in nearly every household, there is at least one person who is standing over the kitchen sink in tears, wondering where the years have gone.

I understand. Every year at this time, I remember a wonderful essay I heard on NPR ... A woman talked about the day she sent her daughter to kindergarten for her first day of school.

“My husband told me not to cry,” she wrote, “because tomorrow she would still be in kindergarten.”

“But, he was wrong,” the essay continued. “‘Tomorrow’, she went to college.”

I still have never found this original NPR essay. I turned ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok loose on the internet to try to find it. They also came up empty. But they found another essay that hit even harder:

Saying goodbye to your children and their childhood is much harder than all the pithy sayings make it seem. Because that's what going to college is. It's goodbye.

It's not a death. And it's not a tragedy.

But it's not nothing, either.
...
The drive home alone without them is the worst. And the first few days. But then it gets better. The kids call, come home, bring their friends, and fill the house with their energy again.

Flying home was slightly better than driving. But it was still the worst. "Tomorrow" for Frances came. It is quieter at home. But some things have made it easier: notifications on Strava when she finishes her runs, texts that she sends with funny or interesting things she sees, and Facetime calls on Sundays. She is where she should be and doing the things she should be doing.