Vacation!

We're back from vacation!! We had a GREAT time as a family, but it's good to be home! I'm not sure you want the whole rundown of the trip, so I'll just give you a quick summary!

Our first day we drove to Billings, Montana and stayed the night there. Uneventful except for the fact that my dad left the key to our borrowed sky box at home, and we had to call in a locksmith.

(Oh, and we made up this system of "tokens," where if one person "argues" with another person they have to put a "token" in. Each token is worth 25 cents, which the unfortunate offender must pay when we get back home. There is also a penalty for asking, "Are we there yet?" which my dad specifically thought up.)

The next couple days we spent at Yellowstone, and saw the bubbling mud, animals, geysers, etc. We did see Old Faithful, and maybe it was the fact that the day was cloudy, (it was hard to see the geyser well) or maybe it was the fact that I was skeptical about how amazing water shooting from a rock really was, but I wasn't terribly impressed. We also were stopped numerous times, by traffic, dozens of people claiming they had seen a pack of wolves, as they peered through their binoculars at several unnatural bumps on a hill.
Anyway, it was fun, and the only thing that I didn't like about it was our cabin. I'm not a great camper type person anyway, so a cabin with insulation coming out of a partly done bathroom, old candy wrappers lodged inside the hideaway bed, a flooding shower, and a toilet on the front porch didn't appeal to me. (Not that I'm complaining or anything, but...)

Grand Tetons was beautiful! Gorgeous snow-peaked mountains, dotted with pine trees, against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. A crystal clear lake, as cold as glaciers, with different colored stones lining the bottom was at the base of it! We stayed in a cabin again. This time it was a plus!

Our time with my dad's brother and his family went very well! It was very relaxing and enjoyable. We kids had so much fun, playing croquet, building dams, sleeping in tents, hiking, and playing a new game we invented titled-"Crawl Ball." Pretty clever? I'll give you the rules another time. It has something to do with crawling and a ball.

After that we headed to Arches, went on some hikes, enjoyed the beautiful scenery, and made our own rendition of Survivor Man. (I'll explain in a minute.) We also explored Canyonlands, and had a bad scare when Ashley ran straight for the edge of a 3,000 ft. cliff. Thankfully, my dad was able to grab her by the shirt, less than three feet from the edge.

Then-home!

By the way, Survivor Man is a show we used to watch on Netflix, and we made our own dvd of it with Julien, titled Survivor Kids. (Don't ask to watch it, our acting is slightly cheesy.) This time we made one about Cade and Claire surviving in "a remote canyon in Utah." I was the filmer and narrator. I'll post it later, when we get it made into a movie, and when we get it together, I have some pictures.

This is getting a tad longer than a brief summary so I'll stop.


By the way, we never actually followed through with the token thing. It died a quiet death when it's container began to overflow, and my dad was cleaning out the car. It was probably just as well. We all had a lot of money in there. We decided we'd cover it over with grace.