Day 9- Bryce

Having a Bryce time

We all sleep until 7:30. This is unheard of in our family. Granted, the kids were up until 9:30 the night before, but whatever. Because of our luxuriously awesome lazy morning, we get a lateish start. Fortunately at this point we are getting really efficient at getting "road ready," with Mike on the hookups (the shitter is ALWAYS full it seems) and mom on the food and clothes storage. Even with the sleep in we make it to Bryce Canyon by 10am, plenty of time to check it out before the clouds and rain set in as forecasted after noon.

Bryce.Is.Amazing. WOW! It literally looks like towers of red and orange fire shooting out of the forest. It is the most bizarre landscape I've seen (and I've seen a pretty good chunk of the world if I do say so myself). We check out Sunrise Point and admire the view. We decide to hike the Queens Garden Trail which is supposedly "easy." However it's really steep going down so Wild Card has to stay on my back and G has to hold Daddy's hand the whole way. We see fairly in shape adults really struggling coming back up, and they don't have a small troll on their back, punching and kicking you the entire way. Wild card is PISSED he can't run down the trail like yesterday and starts pulling my hair and scratching the small mole on my neck while repeatedly asking, "ma is dis a mole or a nipple? is dis a mole? is dis a nipple?" He's kinda obsessed with nipples. He stopped nursing two months ago, but if given the chance he'd be right back at it. Definitely a boob man. Either way, by halfway down I call an audible and say Team Feldbomb is turning around. G was getting tired anyway and I can't imagine how rough the whole climb back up would be. But man, look at this place! I wish we could have hiked more here, but the drop offs were SO steep that it wasn't very much fun for the boys and it was stressful for us. So we just admired the view while we could. We eat lunch in the park right before the rain and head out to Zion, or more precisely Hurricane, UT for our last campground.

Arlo and mommy, both enjoying the hike immensely!

One of my favorite shots from our trip.

The drive to Hurricane is fittingly, very windy.  There is also a huge elevation drop thankfully and my ears are happy. I'm hoping this makes Mike's head happy too. We hit the local Dairy Queen for some milkshakes and fries as an afternoon snack before setting up camp.  The Dairy Queen is very... Utah. It's very rural and very, very white. G and I look practically tribal by comparison. Every family has 5+ kids. The young girls working behind the counter are as friendly and country as they come. At one point, a girl who is bussing the tables around us walks over and picks up Arlo, playing with him and talking to him. I am not one of those people that gets all panicky over someone doing that thank goodness, but I found it so foreign to see a stranger with that comfort level in touching my kids. We realize we are surrounded by BABYSITTERS and wish we had the guts to ask one of them to just come to Vegas with us for the last 2 nights so we could go out. Ha.





This is how we do dinner time:

We get to the campground and it has a heated pool, so no matter the weather those boys are going swimming. We have a bedtime assist as a pool is a sleep maker. Around this time we see a German family with the same RV and 3 children, one about Arlo's age and two older boys. This makes me realize this is the first time we are seeing a family with more than a baby RVing. And we actually haven't seen one other American family with kids RVing or camping (and we won't). This delights my competitive spirit that we are doing something that only a hardy German family can handle. Where are you now China?! Ha! We win the outdoorsy thing!!! I may have had 2 days of relaxation and am now back into full type A Kathleen mode as I am finding a way to associate our vacation with world domination.



USA! USA! USA!