St. George Trip

We wanted to plan a trip for Fall Break.  Our original plan was to go to Arizona and see Meteor Crater, the Lowell Observatory, and Sunset Volcano.  On the way home we'd stop by the Grand Canyon.  It was a little ambitious and by far the longest drive we have ever taken.  It turns out that it was a little too ambitious and we decided to just go to St. George.  We were going to go over UEA weekend but it turned out that I had a concert that week.  So we had to go two weeks later when the boys had a Friday off which was also the day after Halloween.

If you remember from my last post, Jonathan was sick on Halloween.  He was feeling much better the next day, but unfortunately Nathaniel caught whatever it was that he had and stayed home from school on Thursday.  We were planning on leaving as soon as the boys were all home from school.  With Nathaniel home, we could leave earlier - assuming he was feeling better.

We decided to go anyway with the assumption that he would get over it quickly like Jonathan did.  For the most part, it went okay.  He had a little bottle of Sprite that he would drink from every 15 minutes and that seemed to work.  Around Nephi, he decided to try some goldfish crackers.  That turned out to be a bad idea and we had to pull over.  He went back to drinking his Sprite and we didn't have any more problems.

Somewhere in the middle of Utah, I took a turn driving because Jaaromy was getting sleepy.  Just after Beaver I realized that we were almost out of gas.  I really didn't want to turn around and go back to Beaver so we kept going.  Apparently, there is nothing between Beaver and Parowan.  Jaaromy checked his phone for gas stations and it said there wasn't one for 16 miles.  I was getting really nervous.  I had been getting sleepy too, but both of us were wide awake now.  Every little murmur in the car made me think that we were running out of gas.  We started to make plans for if/when we ran out of gas.  We could see some lights in the distance and we were really hoping that we could make it that far.  As we got closer they were definitely gas station lights.  Apparently Jaaromy's iphone app didn't know about this gas station.  We made it all the way.  We were so relieved!

We stopped in Cedar City for dinner at Wendy's and Nathaniel was disappointed that he couldn't eat with us.  He didn't feel like eating at all, but he was still disappointed.  We promised him that we would eat at Wendy's again on our trip.

We got to St. George just in time to go to bed.  I had originally reserved a family suite but for whatever reason it didn't take so they put us in two adjoining rooms which actually worked out pretty well for us.  I assumed that I'd have to share a bed with Brigham since that's what I had to do on our last trip, but he was perfectly happy to share a bed with Jonathan.  So, the boys were all in one room while Jaaromy and I were in another.  Pretty sweet.

It was warmer in St. George than it was at home but the mornings were still chilly.  Jonathan was dying to go swimming, but we said it was too cold.  Also, we happened to be sharing the hotel with a group of band students who were always in the pool it seemed.  We told him we would try later.

Our first stop after breakfast was Dinosaur Discovery.  I didn't know what to expect, but it turned out to be really fun.

 We came at the same time as a group of students from Dixie College so we looked around the lobby a bit while we waited for them to watch a video and move on.

 While we waited for the students, Brigham and I looked around the gift shop.  He played with this dinosaur head and was saying "rawr".  It was so cute that I was totally going to buy it for him before we left.  On our way out, I showed it to him again and he barely looked at it.  (sigh)  No dinosaur head for us.

 We watched a short video telling about the site where and how they found all the fossils.  Then we went to a room with a bunch of kids activities.

 There were a lot of fun things for the kids to do.

They had an impressive collection of fossils.

An actual skin impression!  I thought that was pretty neat.

This is the dinosaur character from the video we watched.

Brigham followed the footprints all around the room.  He'd start to get far away but I knew he would just follow the footprints and he always did.

Jaaromy would not play along when I asked him to act scared.

We found out that for $5 you could buy a foot print and write your name on it and stuff.  So Jonathan picked a foot print and sat on it until the museum guy could come with a pen.

  This is what we wrote.  So if you're ever down there, see if you can find it!

After the Dinosaur Discovery we decided to drive to Santa Clara and see if we could find the house Jaaromy's family lived in when they lived in St. George.  We found it easy, but the outside looked different and it threw Jaaromy off a little bit.  It was fun to see his memories come back.

We decided to drive around the red rocks that are north of the city.  We found a place to park and walk around so we did.

 Jaaromy wanted to climb up high.

 So the boys followed.  In fact, I have a lot of pictures where I'm down bellow, thinking that was as high as they would go.  But they kept wanting to go higher.  I was nervous to follow, partly because of heights, and partly because I didn't want to break my awesome camera while climbing.  But I always ended up following.

 The boys really loved to climb.  Jaaromy climbed up one rock and decided that it was too hard for the boys, then Jonathan popped up beside him and we couldn't figure out how he got up there with him.  Brigham started climbing up a couple of rocks and we had to stop him because there would be no way to get him back down.

 They really loved it.

 The view was amazing too.

 On our way back down we found this "cave".  A gap between two really big rocks.

It felt so good after being in the sun.

It was an unexpectedly fun hike.  We weren't planning on it but it turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip.  It wore us out though and we decided that now was the time to go swimming at the hotel.  The band kids were off doing whatever it was they came to do so the pool was empty.  Jaaromy didn't feel like swimming and Nathaniel forgot to pack his swimsuit, so it was just me, Jonathan, and Brigham.  This was also really fun for me because Brigham had so much fun.  He was grinning practically the whole time.  By the end I even got him to go underwater, and he even liked it!  Jonathan is still too nervous to go underwater but they both had so much fun, it was fun to watch them.

After swimming, I decided we were going to go to the Rosenburch Wildlife Museum.  Jaaromy didn't want to go but I showed Jonathan some of the pictures on their website and he was sold.

 They gave the boys their own set of little binoculars and an audio player that told you about each of the sections.

 There were some interesting animal poses.    This one was actually in semi darkness for effect, I'm sure, but the flash lit it all up.

 This raccoon was easy to miss if you weren't looking up.

The boys thought the baby skunks were super cute.  They had an impressive collection.  While we were looking around the lights turned off and there was some thunder and lightning.  I thought it was kind of neat, but Brigham had run off just then and I was worried it would make him nervous.  It didn't.  We were in and out pretty quick.  I wonder if we missed a room or something.

We went back to the hotel to play on the indoor playground.  Jonathan had been looking forward to it as soon as he found out they had one.  It was nice for Jaaromy and I to just relax while the boys played.  After that we went to dinner and hung out at the hotel.  What a busy day!

The next day after breakfast we went to see the temple.

 Another family was there taking pictures so we did a camera swap.

 Jonathan was really excited to see the temple.

We walked around a bit and then left to start our drive home.

 We drove by Brigham Young's winter home.  We didn't go inside which is kind of lame, but we were anxious to get going.

We stopped in Filmore to see the lava fields.  We looked at them on Google Earth and Jonathan was really excited to see them.  There are also caves but I had no idea where we were going other than towards the volcano.

 On one of the ATV roads we were surprised to see some tanks and other army vehicles coming down the road.

 It was pretty cool to see and one of the Army guys waved at us.

 Since we had no idea where we were going we decided to just pull over and take a look.  Nathaniel wasn't impressed so he stayed in the car.

 In these pictures it kind of looks like a hill but it's actually a fairly flat field.  It's just really big.

That's the volcano behind Jonathan.  If we had some 4 wheelers or something we could probably find the caves, but we really didn't have the time nor the inclination.  Jonathan took a couple of lava rocks as a souvenir.

Then we went on our way.  We were still somewhat full from breakfast but we made it a point to stop in Nephi so we could eat at Wendy's for Nathaniel's sake.  Even though we eat at Wendy's about every other week, it just isn't the same as eating at Wendy's on vacation.

It was a fun trip.  I'm glad we went and that it went well.  Some minor bumps, but overall a success.  I wonder where we'll go next.