summer vacation - Vernal, days 1 and 2

For our summer vacation with my family (the Neilson side) we decided to do all the touristy things while staying at my parent's house in Utah.  Robie was planning on doing an olympic distance race the Saturday before our vacation and a couple of weeks before our vacation it was cancelled.  Can you say, "lame?"  anyway, luckily there was another race of the same distance in Vernal that same day.   It was a little farther away, but we left the same time we originally planned on so we rolled into Vernal at about 4:30 in the morning their time - eek, and I had gotten eaten alive by mosquitos as the gas station in Provo (thanks Provo!) so I had the hardest time falling asleep being wired from making sure I stayed awake driving combined with the horrendous itching since it's also really dry there (also leading to a funny shopping trip in which I was looking for some new-fangled anti-itch cream instead of the old school pink stuff my dad suggested and later wished i had just stuck with what works :) - dad got a good laugh out of that one).  Not a good start, but it was all uphill from there.  The new race was a little bit of a smaller race, which ended up being fun when Robie took second place in his age group.  Anyway, my dad works up in Vernal during the week, so his company has a house for him to stay in up there and we crashed there for a couple of nights - sweet!  Dinosaurs everywhere - the girls thought it was fun and Fox thought it was AWESOME!  We did a hike around to see some petroglyphs

 and checked out the reservoir Robie would be swimming in for the race - it was really pretty by the water.

So many fake dinosaurs around - good times! My dad took us to Gandolfo's for lunch the first day and we had to go back again the next day on the way out of town - cream cheese and BBQ sauce on a sandwich one day, pastrami with delicious sauce the next - what's not to love?

We headed out from Vernal to get over to Kaysville in time to head out to the REAL soccer game -it was so fun even though the first half was really hot with the sun shining straight on us!  Go Salt Lake :)