Utah Trip Zion National Park

The end of April we packed up a ton of stuff including an entire small bag of books (we flew southwest so free bags)

This trip's blog posts will not be in any particular order.  But just kind of how it happens.  So anyway one of the first things we did was leave the kids in the care of my parents and sister and go to Zion National Park for a couple of days.  We first went and visited my grandfather and his wife.  We spent the afternoon and evening with them.  We first went to the Saint George temple.  It was my first time being in one of the older temples, and my grandfather had worked there for 17 years so he enjoyed showing us the details of the temple.

Then we went and toured the house where Brigham Young lived when he would come down to St. George in the winters and to see how the temple building was progressing.  Brian really liked the tree surgery they did to keep this tree alive.

 Then we went to Zions.  We stayed in a cute little inn right outside of Zions.  The owner suggested that we ride the shuttle up and bike down stopping to do our hikes on the way down. (Zions does not allow cars up, you have to shuttle in to the hikes you want to do).  We weren't too excited about it, but after thinking about it decided to try.

We rented the bikes and the bike rental people said to at least bike past the first few shuttle stops because there is a really long line for the shuttle and there is an awesome bike trail.  So we did, and the trail went right by the river it was really pretty.

The weather that day was beautiful and it was a really pretty time of year.  Even the cactus were blooming.

Well we were enjoying bike riding so much that we decided to bike all the way up to the top.  Its not very steep and there was hardly any traffic on the roads, mostly the very full shuttles, and we could stop whenever we wanted to take pictures.  It was about 7 miles up the canyon, and 7 easy miles down.  We didn't do all the hikes we had planned because biking took longer but it was so worth it.

We stopped and did the hike at the very top of the road.  And then we lost the bike lock key and had to hunt for it, fortunately we found it after some praying and frantic searching and were still able to enjoy the hike.

The squirrels on that hike were obviously very well fed from people, they were fat and would let you get ridiculously close to them.

The second hike we did was the Emerald Pool trail.  We hiked up to the third one which let us get some closer up views with the rocks and see some amazing views.  It was chilly up there too, it was quite and elevation change.  Actually for a while I wondered why I was getting so tired and having such a hard time breathing then I remembered I am not used to high elevations anymore.

By this time we were pretty worn out and it was getting late so we biked the rest of the way down and headed back to the inn.  We finished the night with a delicious dinner from the local steakhouse and then went to go see the stars come up that night.  It was an awesome anniversary trip.