Home is where the hair shines

Last week was our family vacation, the one week Blaine gets off work every year. The first two days he was working on a freelance project that didn't finish on time, but that's okay; we went to Seven Peaks waterpark for not free and we had a great time. (We'd "earned" free passes to Seven Peaks last spring through a reading program, but I left the passes home so we had to pay to get in. *shoots self in foot*) But Wednesday through Saturday we went to Zion National Park (first time for me and all the kids) and we camped and we hiked and we didn't shower and we had a seriously so marvelous time, even though daytime temps were 104º. (Nighttime temps in the low 90s or high 80s.) We went through lots of sunscreen and tried to stick with shady hikes and we're barely even pink, and we saw almost everything there was to see in the area we stayed in. There was this fantastic free shuttle system and lots of stops and we hopped off wherever we wanted, always there were bathrooms and water, and then a few minutes later another shuttle would come by and we'd hop on and go to the next place we wanted to visit. After we parked our Suburban in our camping spot we didn't drive it again until it was time to leave.

For me one of the great highlights was when Blaine and the eldest four went off on a hike to Angel's Landing, an arduous thing that takes five hours round-trip and climbs up up up ending on a perilous, rail-free walk along the plateau rim.

(Here's a link to a pictoral someone else made of the hike; the picture above is what Angel's Landing looks like from below, as I saw it.)  I had been shuttling and hiking and doing this and that all around the park with the three littles, trying to kill five hours in a cool way since our campsite was unbearable midday in the 104º heat. I'd decided we'd puttered and hiked long enough and we were shuttling up canyon toward the River Walk (a lovely paved trail alongside the Virgin River, easy to walk and with plenty of places to hop off the trail and play in the shallows, and we all needed cooling off). I used my walkie-talkie as we were getting to the Big Bend shuttle stop which was a view for the Angel's Landing hike, asking where they were. Blaine said excitedly, "We're in the saddle! We just made it to the rim!" And right in my seat on the shuttle, with Macklin in my lap and Kyrie smashed up next to me, I could look out the open window in the ceiling and without even a lean in either direction see Libby in her bright red shirt waving from the rim of the plateau. I saw other arms waving too, but Libby's shirt was the one that stuck out at that distance. The timing was perfect, the position was perfect, and it made my heart smile to sit there in the shuttle and be a little part of the hike going on hundreds of feet (a thousand?) above me. (They had the camera with them, so I don't have a picture of the waving arms. Alas!)

Then Saturday, when our Zion campground reservations expired, we began the trek homeward and on a whim stayed in Fremont State Park campground, also with no showers. It was a pretty big change, daytime temps in the high 80s and nighttime temps in the high 40s, so we were all bundled up in virtually every article of clothing; but the moon was full and the stars were gorgeous and there wasn't a cloud in the sky so we left the rain fly off the tent and the full moon smiled down on our sleeping faces all night. We went to a cute little museum dedicated to the Fremont Indian people whose ancient dwellings had been discovered/destroyed by the construction of I-70, and walked through a canyon that had vast amounts of petroglyphs and pictographs, and climbed into a reproduction of a pit house. So fun.

Usually with this one summer week we go to Priest Lake in northern Idaho where B's family has two cabins on a lake. I've posted about the place before. This time we couldn't afford the gasoline it would take to drive the 800+ miles each way, so we settled for sites closer to home. At least, at the time we thought we were settling. But every day the kids were raving about how much fun the trip was and what a great time they were having. :D

And it was a great cap to the summer. Now I feel like we can go back to school in two weeks, and we haven't missed anything or forgotten to do anything important. Best of all, I'm showered and I smell good and my hair is shiny again.