Vacation: Day One

We made our Memorial Day visit to the cemetery on Saturday before we left.

We just returned from our family summer vacation.  This year, we went to Utah.  I know, I know.  We're so adventurous!  We stayed at Grandma and Grandpa Smith's house, but we tried to act more like tourists than we usually do.  We made an effort to visit as many places as we could - you know, the places that we always say, "We should go there sometime" but never actually do.

We left on Sunday evening after church.  David spoke in Sacrament meeting (he gave a fabulous talk about the eternal blessings of marriage, by the way) so I was left alone in the pew with all four kids.  I was amazed at how well they behaved.  I think part of the secret was having the family behind us offer to let Josh sit by them.  He was so terrified by the idea that if he ever started to act up, I'd just say, "Do you want to sit with them?" and he'd settle back down in a jiff.

We left our house somewhere around 6:00pm.  I'd packed a picnic to eat while we drove and we set the DVD players up, so what could possibly go wrong, huh?  Plenty.  The DVD player blew a fuse about an hour into the drive.  The kids were as good as they could be, but it was a very long drive.  Nicki felt car sick, but never actually threw up.  Bronson started crying off-and-on at about Malad.  By the time we reached Ogden, he was pretty upset.  How on earth did my parents take five kids to California every year without DVD players?!??! 

By the time we rolled in to my parents' house, it was after 9:30pm.  We said hello, changed a diaper or two, and sent the kids to bed.  Grandma had made two batches of cookies and some spaghetti for us, along with a totally stocked fridge of yummy food.  We ate a few treats and visited for a while, then headed to bed around 11:00pm.

At 10:00 on Monday morning, we headed out.  We drove to the Kenecott Copper Mine.  I was born and raised in Utah, but I'd never been there.  It took us a little while to get there because we ended up taking some slower roads.  I was fine with that because Bronson was asleep and it was fun to hear David recall some of his mission experiences as we drove through a few of his old areas.   

The copper mine is pretty cool.  The girls loved imagining a sand box that would be big enough to hold all that dirt!  They have completely hollowed out a mountain!  The dump trucks that haul the dirt are two stories tall!  You have to climb a flight of stairs to get to the cab.  We took a picture next to an actual tire from one of the trucks.  It dwarfed us!  Anyway, there was a nice museum and those big view finder binoculars.  We had a good time there.

That, my friend, is a big tire!

It's hard to imagine how big that hole is, but the trucks are two stories high and our camera is zoomed in as far as it goes.

Ali and Nicki are both looking through the view finder things.  Bronson and I are in the middle of the picture.

After the mine, we wanted to go to the Mayan restaurant, but it wasn't open for lunch so we drove around looking for a Wendy's.  We had to eat there because they had coupons to the Aquarium.  It took a while to find a Wendy's, but Dave came through for us.

When we pulled up to the aquarium, I was a little un-impressed.  First of all, it was PACKED!  There wasn't a parking spot anywhere.  I guess when Memorial Day is rainy, everyone heads for the indoor venues.  We finally found a spot back behind the building.  The second reason I wasn't too excited was the look of the place.  From outside, it just looked like an old grocery store building that had been painted blue.  I was like, "Ehhhh.." 

Once we were inside, we were pleasantly surprised.  It really was a nice aquarium.  There were penguins, and sharks, and an octopus, and jellyfish (a big hit with Ail, who gave a report on them earlier this year) and sea turtles and fun displays about how certain animals see or eat or hide, etc.  The coolest part, however, was touching the sting rays.  Nicki was pretty terrified at first.  I think she thought they would sting her.  She eventually got brave and touched one. Ali touched quite a few.  One ray kept swimming right up to us, sticking his whole head out of the water, looking at us with his glassy eyes, then swimming away.  Then he'd come back and do it again. It was cool/freaky!


At the aquarium.



Here comes the sting ray!

See the sharks?

By the time we left the aquarium, The Mayan was open.  The Mayan is a Mexican restaurant, but it's set in a  jungle with trees and animals and cliffs and rope bridges and a huge waterfall right in the middle of the building.  Every half hour or so, divers perform a show by diving off the waterfall.  It's impressive.  We were some of the first people there when they opened so we got a table right at water level.  The kids loved the diving show.  They even got to give the performers a high five when it was over.  We also saw one of those Cirque-du-Soleil type performances where the woman wraps herself up in a huge scarf dangling from the ceiling and then suddenly unwinds at terrifying speeds until she stops herself at the very last second at the end of the scarf.  Whew! 

It's hard to get a picture with the lighting, but this is the waterfall in The Mayan.

Outside the restaurant.

After dinner, we went back to Grandma and Grandpa's house.  We beat them home.  They had spent  Memorial Day in Delta with my grandparents.  My mom and I went to a fancy new Harmons store that just opened by her house.  It was basically a gourmet grocery store with imported cheeses, artisan breads, a professional pastry chef, sushi, fruit I've never even heard of, all kinds of fancy salads and dishes and cuts of meat, gelato, etc.  It was a food lover's paradise!  I bought myself a root beer flavored cupcake, a huge lemon bar, and some California rolls.  Yum!

I think we were all pretty tired that night and went to bed early.  And that was day one of our vacation.  I'm tired just remembering it.