Summers are grand!

Grand Canyon Nat'l Park

The trip out West was incredible, we managed to squeeze in everything I wanted to see! The Grand Canyon was, of course, awesome. The hike we chose was mostly in the shade, and I kept Kate on the inside of the trail while we went down (and up). We did not make it to the bottom and some day we're going to do that, but not this time.

The next day we went up to Page AZ, and took a smooth water raft trip down the Colorado toward the Grand Canyon. The raft went through Glen Canyon and was very pretty. Joe claims I got into a fight with the guides, but they wanted us to sit on the tubes of the raft and I was worried about the kids (ok Kate) falling into the 46 degree water. If it was a fight, I lost since we all ended up on the tubes. No one fell off and we all managed to survive getting into the water at one of the stops.

Glen Canyon

After the raft ride, we went to Monument Valley. Beautiful, but you can sure tell it's not a National Park. The NP's are run SOO well, with maps, hikes, roads, bathrooms etc.... so from there we went up to Moab to sleep so we could hike in Arches Nat'l Park the next day.

Arches Nat'l Park

From there we did another marathon drive over to the West Utah and stayed in Cedar City. From there we headed for Bryce Canyon and the next day was Zion Nat'l Park. Both were gorgeous, but I think I like Bryce a bit better since the formations (hoodoos) were more unusual.

The kids didn't fight (much) and we ended up in Las Vegas for the last two nights and stayed by the pool. We were at Mandalay Bay (my friend Keith works for MGM and got us a deal), but since we checked in late, we were upgraded to the Four Seasons. Since the Four Seasons didn't have queen beds, I wanted to go back to Mandalay, but they were booked up. Joe claims I'm the only one in the history of Vegas that wanted to get out of the Four Seasons. It worked out for the best, because we could use the Mandalay's pool but they couldn't use ours. So we would go over to the wave pool and lazy river at Mandalay, then come back for quiet time at our pool. The quiet pool also had all the perks, they brought around frozen melon balls, cleaned sunglasses, had ice cold pitchers of lemon water at the tables which they kept filling with ice, evian face spritzers (yes, they sprayed our faces with Evian water), cold face towels. It was sweet. And we were on the 36th floor so we had an incredible view. Awesome, awesome, awesome.