St. George Trip

We held our Mickey Calderwood family reunion this year at Sand Hollow State Park this past weekend.  It's such a beautiful area with the red rock scenery.  On the drive down we had a blow out from a trailer tire.  Since we were caravanning down as a group, I decided to text my family and let them know what was going on.  It didn't take us long to change it with the spare and we were back on the road again.

I just realized that we didn't get a single picture of four wheeling.  I'll try to get them from my dad and download them later.  The three main activities we did were four wheeling at the sand dunes with my dad's four wheeler and Chris's RZR, water skiing at the lake, and visiting Zion National Park.

It was quite warm (107 degrees) down there, but we enjoyed it.  The heat wasn't as noticeable when we were down at the beach at mid day playing, and we all had AC in our trailers for sleeping comfortably at night.

The kids had a great time digging in the sand and playing in the water.  Unfortunately Sand Hollow has a case of swimmer's itch going on right now.  Fortunately for us, we didn't get hit with it until the third day at the beach.

We set up our shade tarp on the beach and escaped the mid day heat.

While back at camp, when the kids weren't off four wheeling or digging in the dirt, they could be found in our trailer playing games.

We took a drive into Zion National Park.  Lisa spotted some bighorn sheep, so we pulled over and got some good photos of them.

We took a group photo at Checkerboard Mesa of everyone minus my mom and dad.

While we were waiting at Zion Lodge, this deer came wandering through.  It was funny to see the reaction of the tourists compared to our kids.  Some of the tourists ran to the concierge in the lodge and asked if they needed to call 911.  Really folks?  Our kids on the other hand are quite used to seeing deer wander through our yard at home, so they smiled and posed for photos.

We took the simple hike up to Weeping Rock with the kids.  Here are some views from under the rock looking back at Zion Canyon.

Kristin and Chris hugging in front of one of the many beautiful cliffs. 

The kids love playing on our boat.  The water temps were around 77 degrees.

My dad getting ready to tear it up on the water ski.

On Monday night we had another awesome sunset.  I caught a couple of good photos of it.

The highlight of the trip for Cole was scorpion hunting.  Each night I would take all the kids out on a scorpion hunt.  I bought a black light flashlight to help us find them.  They are super easy to find with a black light because the glow a bright fluorescent color under the light.  In all I think we found well over 30 scorpions.  I didn't let them catch any because I didn't want them to get stung.  I caught one the first night and took it back to camp just to show the others what the scorpions look like under a black light.  It's really pretty cool.

In all we had a great time as a family.  The kids keep asking us when we can go back there to go camping again.  That's usually the sign of a successful trip.