The Promised Land

It's Memorial Day weekend and we're not going anywhere. And I mean it. I put gas in my car the other day and nearly had a heart attack: $73.25!!!! That's 85 drinks at Mav. Or, put another way, enough refills to get me clear to next Wednesday. Maybe Thursday.


A couple of weeks ago, when gas was only $3.26 a gallon, we went to Zion National Park for a quick weekend trip. We thought it would be a good adventure because the weather was beautiful, the park wasn't crowded yet, and I had forgotten how hard it is to set up the tent in the dark with four incredibly tired, yet inexplicably wild, children.

Sadly, I also forgot that the girls' sleeping bags are more fashionable than functional, so the near-freezing overnight temperatures were kind of a shock. We had fun though, just lots of sleeping thisclose to each other. Which, let's be honest, we do anyway.

All the kids earned their Junior Ranger badges, which means we've only got like 382 more to go. We also bought the National Park Passport book . . . but now we have to go back to the parks we've already visited in order to get a stamp. Right. That's totally happening.

We quite liked the shuttle system, if only because we could take pictures like the one above, without fear of driving off the road into the river. That would have put a damper on things.

The picture above is at Emerald Pool. Though it was more Dirty Brown Also Sort of Smelly Pool. There was also this family up there with several boys that put on quite the show. The littlest brother kept pushing his big brothers in the water and when they decided to repay the favor, their mother cheered them on at an impressive volume. They left to head down the trail at about the same time we did, and let's just say that nobody could hear Spen's protests over Little Wet Kid and Obnoxious and Disturbingly Vindictive Mother. Classy.


We hiked quite a bit (I even took this little video to prove that the kids can, in fact, walk unaided) and saw people climbing the face of Angel's Landing. They were camped for the night, on the sheer rock face in little hanging hammocky-type things. Who's bright idea was that? A twenty-two year old man, no doubt.

"I know, let's climb that 25,000 foot (or so) sheer cliff! And since we can't possibly do it in a single day, let's bring hammocky-type things and sleep up there, with only .000025 inches of fabric between us and quick and decidely messy end to our adventure!! Great idea!"

There's a very nice lodge and restaurant in the park -- I almost got a room there until I remembered that I have not yet won the lottery -- and we decided that rather than cook over a campfire and smell like smoke all weekend, we'd eat at the lodge. And that's the royal we who decided that. There must have been some unposted (because I looked, I swear) dress code that said "No Hats Allowed Even Though You're In a National Park and Probably Going Hiking in the Sun Later" because we were the only people who wore hats to breakfast. Everyone kind of stared as we walked to our table, but we get that a lot, in all honesty. So maybe it was the hats, or maybe it was the mother duck with four thousand ducklings trailing along behind thing. I couldn't tell.