Moab

We took a small vacation to Moab.  We left on a Monday and got back on a Wednesday.  It was a quick trip down and back, but we had fun.  This post has loads of pictures, so get ready...

We drove down, got some lunch and went straight to Canyonlands National Park.  As we were driving into the park, it was raining, but it stopped to let us see some of the sights.  We went to the Island in the sky part of it and hiked a little hike to Mesa bridge first. 

The kids were glad to be out of the car.

Mesa bridge

This is under the bridge.  it is just a drop off on the other side.

We had talked to the kids (especially Owen) about not running off, because of the cliffs all over.  They did pretty well.  Owen's wanderlust kicked into high gear a few times, but overall, he did okay.

There was a sign that said "Please keep off the bridge" and people were walking all over on top of it.  Stupid people.  Some tourist lady yelled at them to get off, and they did, albeit very begrudgingly.  Erin got a picture of the sign with the bridge in the background with people walking on it.  She thought it was funny.

"Look at me mom!  I can climb a tree!"

This is the Green River Overlook.  I really thought the Utah canyons and formations were more impressive than the Grand Canyon.  I'm not a big Grand Canyon fan anyway.

I was so lucky and got some super cool clouds to go with my pictures.

Liam has this growing pain thing in his heel and it gets pretty bad every so often.  He was jumping off of rocks and hit it really good and couldn't walk too well.  This is Owen helping his brother back to the van.  

The next place we went was the Grand View Point Overlook.  Liam stayed in the van because his foot was hurting pretty good, so Owen wanted us to take lots of pictures for Liam.

This is one he wanted me to take of "bigfoot's footprint" to show Liam later.

There were storm clouds coming in, so we got big puffy clouds and dark foreboding clouds too.  There is a bird in the picture above.  How cool would it be to be a bird and fly above these cool formations?

You can see the storm coming in this one.  There was lightning and thunder in the distance, but I wasn't lucky enough to get a lightning shot.

Reagan pretending to be scared of the hole in the rock.

Erin wasn't scared at all until I said something about spiders living in there.  She got out pretty quickly after that.

This was their favorite place to climb and play.  I was sad Liam wasn't feeling good.  He would have liked it.

This picture was right after Reagan was mad for not being in the earlier picture.  It took a little bit to get her to smile.  More on grouchy Reagan later.

The kids wanted to get right near the edge and look down, and we wouldn't let them go unless they were with one of us and holding our hand.

Look at that drop.  So cool!  I don't have a big problem with heights, but it would make me dizzy to look down.

You can see Erin, Reagan and I on the ledge waaay over there in this picture.

A nice couple from somewhere foreign sounding had Cameron take their picture and took ours in return.  After this, we went back to Moab and checked into our motel room, had dinner, gave Liam some ibuprofen and went to sleep so we could get up early the next day to hike Delicate Arch.

This is the Wolfe Ranch cabin, a small detour off the Delicate Arch trail.

Mr. Wolfe lived here for 12 years with his two daughters.  It was teeny.  The daughters insisted he put in a wood floor.  Before that, it was just dirt.

Some petroglyphs we saw on our way. 

This is the picture that sparked 1,000 rages from Reagan.  I took the picture and she wasn't in it because she was running up the trail ahead.  When she saw us taking it, she wanted to be in it, but didn't make it in time and Mt. Reagan blew up.  

I told her we could take another one here, up the trail a little bit, and she was having none of it as you can see in this picture.  She cried and cried and we had to stop for a little while to calm her down.  

She did calm down eventually and was pretty pleasant the rest of the way.

Owen and Reagan loved to check out the rocks and would ask me to take pictures of them.

We had to hike up this big rock.  That was the worst part.

If you look closely, you can see the parking lot in about the middle of this picture.

Can't pass up an opportunity to pose in holes.

Delicate Arch

I never knew it was in a bowl-shaped formation. 

Reagan and Owen were our climbers.

Erin and I hiked down into the bowl to get a little closer.  I didn't trust Owen to come with us.  It wasn't too bad, so the rest of the family eventually came over too.

There was a little flower growing on top of the arch.

These two nice girls from Minnesota offered to take our family picture under the arch.  They were super cute girls.

The view opposite the arch.

There's a little hole you can look out as you are hiking back down and this is the view from that.

Here's the hole.  You have to climb up to get to it.

I promised Reagan we would take another picture at the ill-fated spot on our way back.  Here is the obligatory picture.  The hike was three miles, round trip and the kids did really well.  They were troopers.  Erin really needed to go to the bathroom on the way back, so we would stop to take a picture or something and she would keep walking and say "No time to stop people, we have a bathroom to find!"

We then went to see Double Arch.

This was my favorite part.  Can you see Owen in this picture?

There he is!  He got tired of waiting for all of us and the rocks were calling to him to climb them.  

This was another fun place to climb and play.  The kids liked this part too.

View opposite Double Arch.

Owen was in heaven.

Reagan was pretending she had gotten buried by rocks.  There was a little hole just big enough for her to squeeze into.

How cute are they?

The kids were done by that point, so we decided to nix the couple of other things we were going to look at and got ice cream cones (and cookies for our Erin who doesn't like ice cream) and took them to Rotary park, a fun little park where you can make music.

This was Owen's favorite part.  He would throw stuff in the stream and have Cameron take pictures of it splashing.

He just got done throwing something in.

He also found a nice big stick to carry around.  This was a little field behind the park with a couple of weird little giraffes in it. 

Reagan thought it was fun to ride them.

Here's Liam throwing Owen's big stick into the stream.

That's all she wrote.   That was our vacation.  The kids did really well driving down and back.  We did have a fight about who was going to sit in the very back on the way home (Erin), but we had no throwing up this time!!

Here is our latest craziness.  We had the most crazy storm during church on Sunday.  Hail and thunder and lightning.  It was loud!  Even inside.  We found out later, the angel Moroni on the temple had been struck by lightning and was damaged.  We went up to see him and got this picture.  Poor Moroni.  He did his job well.