Me and my boys...: Summer Vacation 2013: Utah

This summer we were torn between going to Utah to visit family and taking the boys up the West coast to see trees, volcanoes, and more, but we finally settled on Utah, and it was a blast! We had originally planned to go early in the week but the arrival of our newest nephew, John, slowed us down a bit and we cut out the first two days so that we could stay and meet him. :)

We left late one night (morning?) and drove for a while, stopped for a quick breakfast but then had to stop again in Mesquite. Thad was unsure about the tires and had a feeling that we needed to stop and get them checked/rotated so we found a Wal-Mart and pulled off before venturing off into the no-man’s land between Mesquite and St. George. Before we left the low tire pressure sensor had gone off in the van and so we checked the tires and one of the tires was overinflated by 30-40 psi (yikes) and Thad let the air out until it was the right PSI. When they checked our tires one of the back tires had a huge bulge all the way around the tire. Luckily we hadn’t had a blowout! They assured us that they had the correct tires, we bought two, and then waited patiently (ahhh!) for almost two hours for them to put them on. We were so relieved to get back into the car and continue on our journey.

We finally made it to Orem later that afternoon and the kids were so excited to see and start playing with their cousins!

We started our adventures the next morning with the water park, Seven Peaks, in Provo and then golfed after naps. My sis-in-law had told me about the “Pass of All Passes” that we could get to do the water park, golfing, and more, so we got those (9.95 each after the $20 gift card) and I’m glad that we did. We played at the water park, golfed in the rain and in the dark (glow-in-the-dark), and more.

We also enjoyed many afternoons at Thanksgiving Point thanks to our Discovery Cube family pass ($99 for the science center in Santa Ana—gets us into tons of ATSC places for free)—it got us into ALL of the museums/attractions at Thanksgiving Point for FREE and the kids even got to ride the ponies for free! Woo hoo! Let me think…we went to the Dinosaur Museum, the Gardens, the kids Gardens, the splash pads, the farm, and more! Fun, fun, fun!

We celebrated our 9th anniversary on vacation and celebrated by going to the Provo Temple and out to eat at The Brick Oven in Provo with Chris and Jana (Thad’s brother and sister-in-law) while the wonderful sitter babysat our 9 kids without batting an eye (she has six older brothers and many, many nieces and nephews). It was a fun night out!

We got to visit some friends (Megan, Tasha, Natalie) and some family (Jamie, Crista, & Great Grandma although many were on vacation!) but it was fun. Oh, and I forgot that Sunday morning we got to see Music and the Spoken Word live.

Wednesday we headed up to Ogden to visit Union Station (train museum, gun museum, car museum—the boys enjoyed all three but really loved the trains and the model railroads and the huge trains we got to explore) and then back through Salt Lake to visited Great Grandma Heath—she took us to Chuck-O-Rama—which the boys loved! We did tour the Conference Center since we had missed it on Sunday. We also stopped by my cousin’s house to play for an hour before heading back to Orem so I could go see a play with my sis-in-law.

Thursday we got up super early and headed to Moab to visit a landmark, Arches National Park, with the boys. We left at 4:30am to try to get there by sunrise and it was a wonderful morning (with a little whining towards the end by about lunchtime the boys were tired of hiking and very hungry). We stopped for lunch in Moab before heading back. Later in the afternoon, after driving 197 miles back to Orem we took the boys to a Trout farm to fish with their cousins. They each caught a fish (some caught two) and Jana fried them up for dinner.

Thad felt like he needed to check out the tires and realized that they had put the wrong tires on so we had to go back to Wal-Mart where we also found out that they had overinflated the tires that they put on and that even though we had paid for the right tires only one was the right truck tire which could hold the weight of our heavy van, while the other was a passenger tire not rated for our van. Ahh! And we had driven about 1300 miles on it (overinflated as well) and had not had an accident—someone was watching out for us! We felt very blessed to not have had a serious accident! And it took another 1 1/2 hours to have them fix the tires (with nobody in front of us and four people available to work—I’m thinking that Wal-Mart isn’t the place to go for tires. We should have just put on our spare and driven to a bigger city with more choices! AHH!)

We finished up our week by visiting the water park one last time, meeting friends at Costco for lunch, going golfing again, riding the ponies and playing on the Noah’s ark in the water at Thanksgiving Point and having dinner out with the cousins. It was fun and then we had a long drive home the next day. The boys loved it and were sad to leave their cousins!