Before a few weeks ago, the most I had done in southern Utah was drive through it on my way to Vegas (unless you count the family trip to Lake Powell when I was a kid). It's been on my bucket list to go to Zion National Park and Cove Fort. And I really, honestly love road trips and exploring new places. Our trip to St George had all of that!
Dave got off work at noon on Friday (after waking up at 4:30 AM all week to go in to work early). By the time Dave got home I had the car packed and the kids had eaten lunch and we were ready to go! Of course it was just our luck that when the boys woke up that morning they had runny noses and weren't feeling so hot... But at least it meant they would be ready for a nap in a nice warm car. Zeke slept pretty much the entire car ride and the older two boys were asleep for a good portion of it. Thank goodness for that. My favorite part of the car ride was watching the temperature go up- we started out in the 40's and by the time we got out of the car it was 72! We got to St George about dinner time and I'll tell you what- that place is busy! There was so much traffic everywhere! We ate and got to our hotel where the boys were so excited to be able to run and jump. It's fun to see how exciting a hotel room can be for kids.
And now for the fun part... Our Saturday was amazing! Easily one of the top 10 best days of my life. We slept in, had breakfast (yay no cooking), and our first stop was the St George Temple. Allow me to also mention that it was beautiful out! Clear blue skies and warm enough to wear t-shirts. The temple was beautiful with the white against the blue skies. I wish I could have done a session but it was closed for cleaning. Although the perk of that was that it was so not busy that morning. Ethan was loving all of the palm trees and would point out every time we passed one. After that we drove up the hill to the red rocks above St George. We pulled into one of the parking lots and let the boys run free. Ethan and Emery did what came naturally to little boys and started climbing and running and having a great time. I had Zeke strapped to my chest or I would have been right there with them. It was so much fun to climb and explore- the boys found holes and overhangs to climb through and it was really the perfect temperature for running around. I loved the view of St George from up there as well.
We stopped back by our hotel for lunch and then went off to Dino Discovery at Johnson Farm, which sounded cool, but was in reality pretty lame. We were there for maybe 10 minutes. Oh well. We did finally find this dinosaur poster that we had been looking for (for the boys) so I guess there's our silver lining.
And that's when we went to Zion National Park. Wow. Seriously. When we were getting in the car Dave was looking around at all the scenery and pointed at a set of mountains in the distance and remarked about interesting they were and I told him I thought that was where we were headed. And it was. It was awesome to get closer and closer to the park and watch the stone cliffs get larger and larger. I can't even describe how humbling and awe inspiring it was to drive though the park. We were lucky- it was a beautiful day and the shuttles hadn't started yet so we were able to drive the scenic route ourselves, and it wasn't so packed that we couldn't find parking. Dave and I had seen nothing like Zion. It was just beautiful. I took over 500 pictures to try to capture the feeling of the stone walls looming above us but couldn't adequately capture the scale. We hiked up to the weeping rock with the boys because it was one of the shorter hikes. By the time we got done exploring and hiking we had to head back to St George for dinner (it's the only city in Utah with a Jack in the Box). We finished the day by with swimming and a movie and the boys fell asleep pretty fast- I think they were exhausted. :)
Sunday we had to go home (by that point I was all about calling in sick and staying a few more days). We had decided to go back to Zion on our way home as it was more or less on the way. We did one more hike to Emerald Pools, which was a little bit longer for the boys. Again it was beautiful. And we saw a wild turkey too.
It was hard to watch the temperature go back down as we headed home. But at least the sun followed us home. We did stop at Cove Fort on the way home. It is almost perfectly halfway between St George and Salt Lake. Cove Fort was awesome! We had a fun tour and heard about the history and even learned where a few colloquialisms come from- sleep tight and pop goes the weasel. Alas my camera died so I wasn't able to get many pictures of the fort.
And then we made it home and relaxed before going back to work. It was an amazing weekend!
