Zion National Park

Well, that seemed like a crazy month!   The last week of school was a busy one, as usual.  6th Grade Olympics, 6th Grade Award Ceremony, 4th Grade Gold Rush Days (which I was somehow in charge of), Kindergarten end of the year picnic, and, oh yeah, packing for our 11 day vacation.  School was out at 11:50 and we were on the road headed for Zion National Park at 1pm!   We stayed in St. George for the night, where we prepped the food and got all the supplies for the coolers, with lots of food, and lots of water.

As soon as we arrived in Zion on Friday, the kids were itching to get into the river. We stayed strong in our resolve to keep them out of the river until we had the camp all set up, mostly by setting up really quickly! (helped by our tent that sort of pops up like a giant umbrella).

It was actually a lot cooler than we expected.  Forecasts had said to expect 99 degrees and up, but it was in the 80's all weekend, which was perfect weather!  We even actually got a little cold at night, since I had convinced Robie that, since we were low on space, sleeping bags were totally unnecessary.  The forecast I had seen had said the low would be like 65, but instead it was down in the 40's.... luckily, it warmed up quickly.  The white noise of the river helped everyone stay sleeping peacefully.  We usually turn white noise on the ipod for Fox when we are traveling to help him sleep, so I thought it was ironic that he was the one who was asking, "can we turn it off?" "How does it make that noise?" {referring to the noise of the river}  It was quite loud, and he must have liked it deep down inside since he slept great!
Mark was the pancake and woof'em master, while Robie was the fried egg and Tin Foil dinner master. Gotta have some skills, you know?

Mostly, the kids enjoyed just walking a little farther up river, and launching themselves off, then floating by our campsite, then going on to this little rope swing just down the river.  Then they would come back up and do it all over again (maybe a snack in between?) or they would just go down and throw rocks in, or just look at the dirt at the edge of the river.  It was really just a beautiful location.

We finally dragged them out on Saturday to go into Zion.  We got up to the front and were told that it was "Get Outside Day" so everyone got in free.  Sweet.  Fox' favorite part was definitely the shuttle.  He loves anything to do with transporation so riding a big is at the top of his list of exciting things!

We had decided to head all the way to the end of the shuttle ride to the Riverside Walk, which is also the short hike that leads you to the start of the Narrows.  There was conflicting info (one paper said it was 1 mile one way, the other paper said it was 3 miles roundtrip), but we had decided to go crazy and give the Narrows hike a shot, too.  I stayed behind with Fox while all the older kids and parents started the hike.  They only had their water shoes (as opposed to a lot of people that we saw that had these watershoe/hiking shoe hybrid shoes they had rented) so they didn't go that far into the Narrows, but still loved it.  They think they did about another 1/2 mile?  The kids were swiming through some of the spots, although Robie had the nice camera, so he stayed dry at least from the waist up!

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The whole process (shuttle, Riverside Walk, change into water shoes, hike back, change back into regular shoes, walk Riverside walk the other way) took a little longer than we expected.  We still had plenty of water, but the food was getting scarce, so we stopped at the lodge for what turned out to be some surprisingly good food (because we were hungry or it was good?  we'll never know). 

Of course, there had to be more tubing when we got back to the campsite, and here's where the only ,"well, that was less than good" part of the trip began.  The group (Mendenhall whole family and Tyler family minus Fox and myself) decided to do the "whole" river experience.  Instead of just tubing in front of our campsite, there were other people renting tubes and going down for two hours and ending at a park.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  I took Fox and drove down to the Wal-mart in Hurricane to get more air mattresses (two of ours had died the night before, which is not good for comfort), and I got back about 2 hours later ready to pick up the tubers and take them back.  I should have known that when the kids started showing up (Ashley and James) without the parents, and then Mark with 2 kids on his lap, that there had been trouble afoot.  No one got injured, but some of our cheap tubes we brought didn't quite make it and the river was just a little too low to truly enjoy the tubing without running into rocks every two seconds and having to strong-arm out of the rocks 

Luckily, everyone could laugh it off and have a great night with more food (hot dogs, more smores and woofems, and watermelon).   The kids even went down to the ropes swing again, pretty much until it was dark, which in Souther Utah is like 10 o'clock.   Just trying to master their technique I guess.