The bruise

Photo evidence of "The Great Bruise"

Mud, Pain, The Whole Darn Thing

Pictures from the Grapes of Wrath Mud Run on Sept. 13th - a memorable day!

mud

Testing, testing...

Photo failure

I am at wits end with the blogsite these days. I've tried every day for a week to load up the next Utah day's worth of pics to no avail. I harbour some suspicion that there may be some sort of maximum capacity for photos that I have reached without realizing it. I don't know how long it will take to figure my way around this problem. Just imagine another hundred photos of scenic rocks. In chronological order of the trip you would next imagine really bumpy rocks (Goblin Valley), then really smooth rocks (Moab), then a really deep chasm in the otherwise very flat rocks (Island in the Sky), then really red rocks (Moab again), then a really famous rocks (Arches and Monument Valley) and finally a village made of rocks hidden under the side of a high rock ridge (Mesa Verde)!


I'll keep working on those photos - but you've got a rough sense now!

Onwards through Escalante, Capitol Reef and Goblin Valley...

Photos of Bryce Canyon National Park

Our one and only great family shot of the entire trip. Hey, you only need one!

My gem collector at a rock shop surrounded by geodes, obsidian and quartz to buy by the pound. What more could a boy ask for?

Bryce Canyon National Park

A prairie dog. Meditating.

A spectacular hike that I did on my own at sunset. Coming up was significantly slower than going down...

Utah was so beautiful it was surreal. We kept expecting to get used to views like this one. We never did.

Home At Last

We finally rolled in at 8 oclock last night after 26 (19 for Brendan and I) glorious day of road tripping. The final photo count is an absolutely shocking 3,500. Oi. If I edit and put them into a photobook at the rate of 10 a day, I should have all my photos archived and presentable in... a year. Sweet heaven above.

So my plan for tonight was to cull out the one best photo from each day to post up here. I couldn't do it. So I at least made it through the first four days - the first phase of our trip together - Zion National Park in Springdale Utah, in the south west of the state. An awe inspiring place with red and orange sheer, jagged mountains rising all around you, and an oasis of a river running through the bottom of the canyon. We did a few hikes here, and also spent one day doing a day trip to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If i keep talking I'll never get these photos up, so here goes...

Flying over the Rockies

Cruising The Strip in Las Vegas

Valley of Fire State Park - a hike and picnic lunch on our drive from Nevada to the campground in Utah

The drive through Valley of Fire

The paved bike trail through Zion National Park

 

 

The view from the top of a the Canyon Overlook hike Rob did on his own - he is standing on top of a stone arch you'll see in another picture shortly - the road in the distance is an amazing set of switchbacks coming out of the Zion Mt. Carmel tunnel - one of Rob's favourite drives of the trip

Our home away from home, and the campsite with the best view on the whole trip

Another spectacular hike in Zion National Park, alongside the river in the ever narrowing carnyon. The trail eventually became JUST the river, and advised people continuing on the "wet hike" that there was a flash flood warning of MODERATE on for that day. Thank you, no. We thought that was a good place to turn around.

One of the breath taking view points along the Grand Canyon (the small peninsula in the distance is where we hiked out to)

The Grand Canyon. Wow.

The drive back from the Grand Canyon through Zion to our campground - this is the arch Rob hiked to the top of!

Our second day in Zion we hiked up to a waterfall and spotted lots of lizards

Roasting weenies!

The next installment - hitting the road for Bryce Canyon National Park, Escalante National Monument, Capitol Reef National Park, Goblin Valley State Park and Little Wild Horse Canyon - and that's just two days. You can see why I took 3,500 photos!

Photos

Suddenly I hit a WiFi connection that allows me to post photos, except I haven't really taken any - they're all on the cameras - I can show off my long suffering road companions and our home away from home...

Missouri

Great day! Drove across the rollling hills of the Ozarks, toured the famous Meramec Caverns, saw Bigfoot (the monster truck) at his home shop in st Louis and rode the elevator tram to the top of the St Louis Arch. An epic day, probably the kids favourite of the whole trip - Brendan loved the cave, Harrison died and went to heaven at the monster truck shop and Heidi got to sit in the truck and colour for 3 straight hours (she draws tiny circles in her tiny notebook and declares every 10 minutes "I write my name!").  We even capped the night off by getting lost in the sketchy neighbourhoods of St. Louis after dark (thanks for nothing, GPS) - never a dull moment!

Nancy

Missouri

Still not being allowed to upload photos - so annoying. Anyways, a couple of great route 66 days, with a lot more sightseeing than I had expected considering we're still having to pack away 500 km away each day. The babies have run and squealed their way through a great museum in Clinton Oklahoma, a giant cement blue whale in Catoosa Oklahoma and upended Cadillacs in a field In Amarillo Texas, all at top volume. Each day Brendan says his highlight is the campground pool or playground. Oh well, nobody ever said family road trips were non stop fun. Not until you look back at them at least, and have forgotten the parts where your mother yelled at you from the front seat to "stop getting distracted and finish your G.D. spelling dictation homework so she can put the movie back on and make your siblings stop crying". Ahhh, good times. Harrison may have some fond memories however, thanks to his love of Cars the movie. We've met Mater, Mr. Mater (the actual pickup that inspired the movie character - we told Harrison it was Maters father) and Grand Mater (a beautiful old pickup outside the building that inspired Ramones paint shop). Harrison had long conversations with all 3 trucks!

Onto Meramec Caverns and St Louis tomorrow, a train museum on Saturday in Illinois and then into Ontario to crash at my mom and dad's by Sunday. Monday well arrive home and try to beat a path through the waist high grass to the door!

Pics from the campground

Thank goodness for free wifi at a coffeeshop...

Eastward Bound

We saw monument valley yesterday, and the four corners, where you can put a hand and foot (or a child if you have enough)  each in a different state. Then we turned our wheels eastward and headed out of Utah, saying goodbye to desert heat ( probably only briefly ). We're into Colorado now, and the lush greens of mountain meadows are such a contrast from the last 11 days it's quite disconcerting. We saw the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde this morning. The children were mildly interested. Thank goodness I'm taking pictures so they remember they were here. As we speak, I'm fighting with Brendan to finish writing his journal entry for monument valley - it reads "today i saw a goat".

Nancy

Ps photos are sadly flatly refusing to upload - I've taken 1200 so far - consider yourself lucky I can't upload them all!

Amazing

Days and days without WiFi is killing me, but every national park here in Utah is more jaw droppingly beautiful than the last. Perfect weather but wicked hot. Ride our bikes in Moab yesterday, and 4x4 d down a killer switchback in the truck today - as the locals would say - totally sick! Kids aren't seeing much - prefer to sit in the truck watching Mickey Mouse - so mostly rob and I tease off and do hikes individually, pulling everyone out for visitors centres and short hikes only! Onto monument valley tomorrow and the road trip continues!  Gotta go, rob is pulling out of gas station with free WiFi!

Final day in zion

We are sitting around a campfire at our site outside Zion National Park recapping our first 4 (11 for Rob) days of the trip. "Most amazing sight" is shockingly a total draw - the grand canyon was fantastic, no doubt (it was Brendans pick), but the plateau east of the Zion park tunnel was also like nothing I've ever imagined and I saw a big horn sheep, so that holds a real soft spot for me. For Rob, exiting the Zion tunnel after 6 loooong days driving across the plains and desert - the 2000 foot tall sheer red rock faces of the Zion canyon rising all around him runs a pretty close second to the grand canyon he said.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. In the original sense of the word.

We've been fitting in lots of fun and adventures too, hopefully not so many we burn ourselves out early. The twins are doing very well on out hikes so far. We got off the shuttle bus at a trail head with a gentleman with a walker a few days ago, and joked that we should at least try to keep pace with him. He beat us soundly. We've set some ground rules: no hikes after 11 am (the sand radiating the midday heat back from under your feet is sort of similar to feeling like you're in a convection oven, I would think), no hikes "with a number before the zero" (ie. longer than 1.0 miles), and everyone who makes it to the end without falling over the edge gets 2 Oreos (we added that one at the grand Canyon yesterday).

We move on to Bryce Canyon National Park for a night tomorrow, and then onto Goblin Valley State Park for a night of boondocking (camping on public land) somewhere in the San Rafael Swell. The next night we make it Moab, mountain biking capital of the world, where we should have WiFi again. Rob is fighting with the awning as we speak, I should go help him. If I eat one more toasted marshmallow ill probably burst anyways...

Grand Canyon

Rob made it to the grand Canyon yesterday, and finally to the campground in Utah where we will call home for 5 nights. It's been long days on the road for he and bob, he sounded relieved to have finally arrived when I talked to him. I don't know if my phone updates. o the blog will work once Brendan and I leave Canadian airspace tomorrow morning, so this could be the last update for a bit. B and I fly out to las Vegas tomorrow at 9, let the next part of the adventure begin

Hello from Utah

Well, my mental images of effortless blogposts from Utah has not turned out to be a reality, so this may turn out to be a one time event.  I picked Brendan up from school yesterday and started "the great migration westward. We made it to Toronto with no hiccups and had enough extra time before picking up my Mom and Dad at Terminal 3 that we rode  the new monorail train at Toronto airport a few times. Their dog Dougald was thrilled to be reunited with Mom and Dad and we went out for a delicious dinner out and stayed up long past a sensible time catching up about their 5 week adventure in Europe. Brendan's journal entry for Day 1 - Today hour I ate a bun.

We were up at an unspeakable hour this morning to catch our flight to Las Vegas. New kiosks made the whole security check in and customs process all much faster and we were at our gate waiting 2 hours before the flight departed.  We got ahead on homework, and played with hot wheels cars until the plane boarded. Once settled in, Brendan asked "how many days are we on this plane?" He really seemed pleasantly surprised when I explained we'd arrive the same day. 4 1/2 hours later we had arrived and were ready for the next part of the adventure to begin.

Bob headed off to his departure gate to fly home to Toronto YYZ before we got through security, but has texted to say that he made it home safely. Rob had all sorts of stories of memorable miles with his Dad on the trip out and it sounds like it was a very worthwhile trip. Harrison was very excited because he was wearing a sweather (he gets easily excited about fairly mundane things). Heidi refused to make eye contact with me for 20 minutes and cried when I tried to touch her.

We cruised the strip from end to end in the truck, just to show it to Brendan and reminisce about our seperate weekends here, and then hit the interstate across the barren desert. An hour later, we stopped for a picnic lunch and hike amongst some of the most spectacular terrain I have ever seen in my life at Valley of Fire State Park. An astounding way to begin a trip that I think will be punctuated almost every day with phenomenol natural sites. I took 148 pictures today, and we didn't even get out of the airport till noon!!

Our campground has an amazing view of the mountains, and we have a very nice corner site with our trailer tucked in between lots of others. After a dinner of microwaved quiche and a cold Bud Light Lime from the fridge while the air conditioning hummed in the background we agreed - this will certainly not be like any other camping adventure we've done before!

The great American Road trip

Well, they're off! Rob, the twins and Blaze have headed off down the highway for our most epic road trip yet (and that's saying something!). They met copilot Bob (pictured below preparing for the journey) in Cambridge and are heading ever westward in the truck and 28 foot camper trailer down Route 66. Pictures have already started rolling in - it looks awesome! The trip is going fairly smoothly, but has not been easy driving - traffic, rain, wind etc., but the babies have reportedly been perfect! Brendan and I are lagging behind to maximize the time in school and at work and look after my parents doggie Dougald till they return from Europe, but will eventually be flying out to Vegas to meet the whole gang (and trade places with Bob, who will joyfully fly back on that same day). We'll do the grand canyon and parks of southern Utah and then ride route 66 back eastward! I'm sure there will be lots of pictures when we get back, and a few colourful stories too.

Talk to you soon!!

Spring!

Super Dad - I'm pretty lucky.

It's spring! Yes, the snow has melted (all directly into the river apparently, although we're nowhere near the real flooding, so thank goodness for that), the playground (or as the neighbours call it -  the park or Lockland) is open, the trailer is untarped and it's time to clean to 6 pounds of cheerios out of the car seats after a long winter.


We had a wonderful Easter, combining old traditions with new ones - the Port Stanley steam train ride became a monorail ride at the airport, the walk to the bakery for Spicer's cookies became a walk to the Lonsdale Women's Institute (magically still for Spicer's cookies - thanks Mom!) and our usual 3 easter egg hunts became 5 - but I can't complain because the two new additional ones were set up by the kids FOR the adults and involved hiding cans of beer around the house - all their idea, but much appreciated none the less. We decorated 4 dozen eggs and even had a new category in the egg voting - most harassed egg (honourable mention to the poor egg Heidi dropped more than 20 times, but valiantly kept on colouring and dyeing and colouring and dyeing). We even squeezed in a wonderful night at Great Wolf Lodge to kick the whole holiday off.


So with the ground thawing, it's time to turn our thoughts to our Route 66 - Grand Canyon - Utah - Epic family road trip! We are starting to pack in bits and pieces and I will hopefully squeeze in another post before we go. Rob, the twins and Blaze will head out a week before Brendan and I, driving Route 66 west bound in 6 days (well at least that's the plan!). Bob will meet them en route to act as navigator and DVD movie changer extraordinaire. Then Brendan and I will fly into Las Vegas (the far western point of the trip) the day Bob flies back home and begin a 10 day tour through Utahs National Parks and cruise back along Route 66 in a slightly more leisurely 8 days. Gonna be memorable! I'll take pictures.

Opening the trailer

Having car seats inside is a fun novelty until you try to take them back outside.

Princess Willpower was not too pleased.

But she is having fun here!

First Flower of Spring in our garden!