Summer 2008 Vacation

For the past five days, we have been trekking through Utah's national parks and visiting Las Vegas. A few weeks ago, Mark and I were thinking about going to Yellowstone National Monument, so we asked Valentin if he would like to go there. We wanted to take our kids on a trip this summer so they could have some fun memories to share with Kaelei when she got home. Valentin said Yellowstone would be okay, but he would really like to go see the Grand Canyon. Mark and I discussed it for a minute and decided Grand Canyon would be a great family vacation too and we could stop in Zions, Bryce, Four Corners and Arches if we took that trip. We gave Valentin a choice, Yellowstone or Grand Canyon, because we can't do both. He chose Grand Canyon.

Over the next few days, we tried to formulate travel plans. We have a big map on our kitchen table, so we continued to discuss our options throughout the next day. We were planning to leave the night of Wednesday, July 23, and it was now Sunday, the 20th. As we were talking about our route, Valentin joined us for the conversation and realized that we were not going to the Grand Canyon via Las Vegas. He was so disappointed. (I guess many foreigners think you go to Grand Canyon from Las Vegas.) We told him the trip would be lots of driving if we went to Las Vegas and we would not be able to go to Four Corners or Arches if we went that route. He just said he would prefer Las Vegas. Mark and I re-evaluated our route one more time and really couldn't come up with a great solution as far as a schedule for each day and where we would sleep. All we knew was we were leaving Wednesday night and staying with his brother in Cedar City.

We left Wednesday night without much more planned than Zions and Bryce Canyon for Thursday. As we went through those parks on Thursday, we decided on the rest of our vacation. We would go back to Cedar that night, then go to the Glenn Canyon Dam and Grand Canyon on Friday. Friday night we would drive to Las Vegas and stay with Deb's Aunt Marie and Uncle Foy (if they were going to be home), then would go to Boulder Dam and the Las Vegas strip on Saturday. Sunday we would get up and drive to Cedar City or Milford. We would decide that detail later.

We ended up following our schedule fairly close. We were lucky my Aunt Marie and Uncle Foy were home and wiling to let us stay two nights at their house at the last minute. We only gave them one day notice! They were great. Saturday morning, they fed us a wonderful breakfast with pancakes, bacon, and a variety of fresh fruits. Valentin though he was in heaven. And, even though they had early church Sunday morning, they still left us fresh fruit, homemade bread, and cereal for breakfast that morning.

Kevin, Selene, and Kasey were also great hosts in Cedar City. They fed us hamburgers and macaroni salad and homemade root beer (the bottled kind) Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. because we were so late getting back from Zions and Bryce. Sunday, they fed us Spaghetti several hours later than planned because we took so long to come home from Las Vegas.

Speaking of Las Vegas, we got up Sunday morning and realized we never took Valentin to a gift shop for him to buy a postcard. So, even though it was Sunday, we made a quick stop downtown Las Vegas at a gift shop. While we were looking around, Mark came walking towards me with a horrified look on his face. He told me the compact flash card in the camera wasn't working and kept giving him an error message. This was horrifying because all the pictures from our last four days of vacation were on that card. He spent the next twenty minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem and decided the flash card wasn't going to work and that we had probably lost all of our pictures. At this point, we decided we had better at least go get the "Welcome to Las Vegas" picture again because Valentin kept seeing that sign on advertisements and asked us specifically for that picture. So, we headed back toward Henderson to get that picture. We ended up leaving Las Vegas about two hours later than planned, but we didn't care much since this vacation was kind of a make-it-up as you go vacation anyway.

As we were approaching Cedar City, Mark saw the sign for "Kolob Canyon" which is now a national park also (a branch of Zions). We decided to stop there to get some more pictures, since we didn't want to go home from our vacation without any. Just when we were getting the last picture we spotted lightening in some black clouds on the ridge and decided to head to Cedar. Just after we got in the car, the rain storm hit. The rain drops were huge and tons of rain fell in a short amount of time. It was cool to drive through though. In Cedar City, Mark tried again to recover the pictures on the compact flash card and was unsuccessful. Mark and his brother Kevin were thinking the FAT files had probably been written over and maybe there was a way to still get the information off the card. We were hoping!! In the meantime, Mark was bummed about our luck.

We ended up staying in Cedar Sunday night because Mark found out his Grandma was in Milford. She is in New Mexico most of the time nowadays, so we decided we had better plan some time to visit her on Monday. Monday morning, we drove to Milford only to find out his Grandma had gone to Cedar for the day with Mark's cousin Mary. Mark didn't call to let them know we were coming so they didn't know to watch for us. Mary said they would be back in a couple hours, so the kids played and sang with the player piano, then Mark's uncle Bob and his kids Lisa and Briti and their kids came to the house to visit for a while. We eventually decided to drive up to the family cabin while we waited.

After hiking and shooting the 9mm pistol at the cabin, we drove a few miles along the base of the Milford mountains to the Geothermal Plant and Mag Wash to see the hot springs. We had a few adventures driving over some washed out portions of the road. The same rainstorm we had drove through in Cedar City had hit the Milford mountains. The flash floods had done some damage to a few places in the road. At one point, the kids had to get a log to put on a big gap in the road to get us across. We eventually got to visit Grandma Merryweather. The kids got a little bored and ended up playing with the massage mat on the recliner. It's amazing how certain things provide the cheapest entertainment!

Toward early evening, we decided to head back to Salt Lake. A few miles outside of Delta (Deb's hometown) we took our adventures a little further and stopped at Sunstone Knoll (and old volcano) and collected crystals for a half hour. (Jaxzen has been bugging us for several months to stop there so he could add to his rock collection.) It was also another photo opportunity. We were feeling better about the additional pictures we were getting. I had been bugging Mark to call our friend to ask him about the possibility of recovering the pictures off the card, so Mark finally did. Our friend assured us that the pictures could be recovered. He said it was most likely a problem with the FAT files and he had a program that would fix the card. Mark totally cheered up after this phone call. We finally made it home around ten o'clock. We were glad to be home. See some of our pictures on each our post for each day of our trip. We did get the pictures recovered!!! Thanks Anthony!!