Family Vacation

This is going to be one long post…..are you ready?  Set go.

Every summer Josh has a Mountain west campus conference.  That’s fancy wording for lots of campus cops from Utah and Idaho getting together and having a conference/training.  This year it was in Rexburg at BYU-I.  So we trailed along too and brought the trailer with us.  Getting ready to go was interesting.  The week before we left looked like this Josh working, working working, super secret SWAT op (ok maybe not super secret) then SheriDawn working working.  So I tried to get everything ready then I made a list for Josh while I was working.  It was interesting.  I got home from work Tuesday morning and we loaded the rest of the stuff and the fam and headed out the door.

Tracen washing the truck the night before.  The boots are very important to the whole operation…

Now the big boys (Ty and Jesse) had been at Aunt Crystal and Uncle Kurt’s new house in Roosevelt for a week and a half.  Jesse had come home a few days earlier but we were meeting them in Provo to get Ty back and for a little fun.  I tried to sleep on the way to Provo and did a semi decent job, but if you haven’t realized how bad the roads are between Parowan and Provo, especially with the construction, just try sleeping through it.

We got to Provo and spent the afternoon and evening at 7 peaks water park with Crystal and Kurt, which was way fun and I have absolutely not one picture of it.  But we all had a lot of fun there.  They boys didn’t really ever want to leave I think.  Then we went shopping at REI and out to dinner at Olive Garden with them.  By the way we all looked amazing at Olive Garden too.  All dressed up and stuff.

Then we stayed the night at a trailer park in Salt Lake.  The next morning we went to Temple Square.  The Friend had a thing a year ago where you could submit artwork to them and Tyler submitted a painting.  Well his painting is in the online children’s exhibit.  So we wanted to see if it was in the exhibit at the church history museum.  His original painting isn’t up hanging on the wall but they have several tv screens with slide shows going on them and we waited around until we saw it on there.  There were lots of fun exhibits at the museum for the kids to play with, so we spent a little bit of time there.  Then we walked around the temple grounds for a minute and then headed out.

We hooked up the trailer and headed to Idaho.  It’s a fairly long drive from Salt Lake to Rexburg.  It was pretty though, I don’t think I’ve been that way ever, or since I’ve been old enough to pay attention anyway.  But after awhile the kids got ancy and needed a break.  So I kept telling Josh that we needed to stop somewhere.  I think I started before Pocatello and then suddenly right about Idaho Falls he veers off the freeway and we end up in this parking lot.  The only place Josh will stop between Salt Lake and Rexburg.  Are we all shocked?  I’m not.  We stopped…..and shopped for over an hour at the “Idaho’s largest surplus store, Army surplus warehouse” and no I’m not kidding.

The boys all made purchases there….yes they surely did.  Josh even wanted to stop on the way home….to bad we went the other way.  Josh and Jesse are walking out to check out the army surplus vehicles you can buy. 

It was at this point that I realized the genius in pulling your own bathroom behind you when you have a potty training toddler.  While Josh and Jesse checked out the cool trucks, Tracen got to use the potty.  yipee.

Tyler bought rocks I think…or something like that.

We finally arrived in Rexburg.  The trailer park we stayed at there had a little park and luckily we got to pull in right next to it.  It was so nice for the boys to be able to just go out and play and for me to be able to watch them from under my shade.  I’m pretty sure they were the only kids there.

We drove around town for a bit and figured out where things were.  We found a drive in movie theatre which the boys wanted to go to so bad but it wasn’t really playing a kid appropriate movie.  The next morning I dropped Josh off at his training and me and the boys set out for the day. 

We went to Bear World which is like a drive through Jurassic Park for bears, elk, moose etc.  So we did the drive through.  I let Ty have the camera and Jesse have the video camera.  Jesse’s a little Jade in the making.  He loved the video camera :)

A white Elk.

A wolf…and the inside of our truck.

It’s a good thing we went to bear world because it’s the only place we’d see any bear the entire trip, and they had quite a few.

Then they had a petting zoo we spent some time in.

Baby bears….you can pet those for an extra $35 a person…we didn’t do that.

Tracen says “mom this rock has music”

Then they had little rides that I made Ty and Jesse take Tracen on the little rides.  I’m sure I’ll hear about how it scarred them later in life :)

After that we went and got lunch and headed to the park.  The park had a splash pad and an old carousel with a organ and drums that played off of a paper roll.  It was really cool.  Tracen was so excited, then he cried, then he had fun.  Funny kid.

This John Deere store was down the road from our RV park.  This is the clearance aisle.  Do you think I can afford one if I buy it on clearance?

It rained all night and then Josh had to be back the next morning for a half day.  We went and walked around the temple grounds.  The Rexburg temple is really pretty!

We picked up Josh and went and hooked up the trailer and headed to Yellowstone.  It POURED on us almost the whole way there.  We got to Old Faithful about 25 minutes before it went off-lucky us.  It stopped raining about long enough for us to see it and then started pouring again.

Waiting and waiting…

We got to our very small campsite and set up and played.  Linky LOVED the puddles.  It took two days to dry out his shoes.

We stayed on Yellowstone Lake.  It’s huge!  We went down to bridge bay and walked around.  Yellowstone sports some amazing homemade vehicles.  Josh offered to build me a car like this.

Isn’t he sweet?

Here are some homemade trikes…

This is how Link ate most of the time.  He insisted on sitting ON the table.

The next day (Saturday) we  went out to see the sites.  Tracen was hilarious!  We got to the first geyser and he said “I think I stink a little bit, I need a bath or a shower”  after we explained to him that geysers just stink then he went with things like “I stink a little bit, I smell like geyser” and “I smell geyser!”  He liked saying geyser.

We saw tons of buffalo.  We watched one swim across the river and then walk across the road between two motorcycles.

We hiked to some amazing waterfalls.  Tracen did a lot of hiking…and I did a lot of piggy backing him back up the hill.

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

Jesse tried his hand at packing Lincoln for about 100 yards

We stopped at a visitors center and played tourist.  Looked around at everything.  They had some really cool stuff in there.  Then we got ice cream.

Sunday we packed up and headed for Jackson Hole.  Lincoln is sick of being in his car seat at this point!

The Tetons

We set up camp at Gros Ventre campground then went to Jackson Hole to play tourist some more.  We drove around and then walked around the old historic part of town and window shopped.

For dinner we got a bucket of chicken and went down to one of the cool rapids on the snake (lunch counter) and ate dinner and watched some guys play in the waves in their kayaks and surf boards.

 

Monday was probably my favorite day of the whole trip.  We rented a kayak and a canoe and went to String Lake.  It’s this little lake right at the base of the Teton mountains.  It only gets 6 feet deep.  We paddled around and played all day.  It was so pretty and the temperature was perfect.  The kayak was definitely the favorite we should have gotten two of them.

 

Don’t worry, Link wouldn’t wear a life jacket he screamed the entire tie it was on.  But it’s like 2 feet deep where they’re at.  He had absolutely no fear of the water whatsoever.

Isn’t the view amazing?

I don’t know who this guy is but tons of people had these boards and I want one!

Yes, Jesse ended up falling in before it was over.

And they told us this was a one person kayak.  What do they know!

 

We returned the boats and then found this park.  It had climbing stuff all over, it was way cool.  Ty, Tracen and Jesse loved climbing all over it.

That night we had a fire and made s’mores and all that fun stuff.  The mosquitos were out and they got Tracen a few times before we got enough bug spray on him.  The next day his hand got swollen and benadryl wasn’t helping.  It didn’t look like he had cellulitis but I took him to the dr anyway on Wednesday after we were home.  He just had an intense local reaction and we had to put him on prednisone to get it to go down.  It was so puffy and big.  This is the best picture I could get with my phone.  it doesn’t quite do it justice.  It’s swollen clear up his arm.

We had talked about driving home at night while the kids slept because it was going to be such a long drive and we had spent a lot of time in the car during our trip.  But we woke up Tuesday morning and decided to head home.  It was a LONG trip home.  And there’s not much to look at for a good portion of the trip.  Thankfully the boys were able to watch movies on Josh’s laptop most of the way.  We stopped in Heber City at a park and ate lunch and let the kids run around and then stopped in Provo and got some super duper yummy sub zero ice cream.  The boys loved watching the liquid nitrogen and touching it.

We got home about 8 pm exhausted. 

We had so much fun though and it was a great trip.  The boys had fun and we got to see a lot of cool stuff.  The best part was the 3 or 4 days where we had no cell service.  I especially loved it that Josh couldn’t get calls or emails about work.  It was a good trip!