Vacation Day Eight: Transportation and Earth Art

Saturday was a beautiful rain free day. We headed back up to Northern Utah to go see the things we had missed on when it rained us out on Tuesday.

Our first stop was the ATK rocket display. It's a whole bunch of rockets that ATK has designed over the years. They are all just sitting there.
They are huge.

They all have little information plaques so you know what you are looking at.

Then we drove to the Golden Spike National Historic Site in Promontory. This is where the transcontinental rail road was completed.
I got a pressed penny. These are my favorite souvenirs because they are cheap (only 51 cents) and flat. I have a whole bunch of them in a picture frame at home.
The visitors center had lots of cool stuff like this replica of the Golden Spike.
Outside the had replicas of the trains. This is the Jupiter.
And this is the 119. Now a days the trains don't run through Promontory. They go across the Great Salt Lake.
It's actually a good thing that we didn't get to come out here until Saturday. every Saturday they do a reenactment of the completion of the rail road. Watch this short video of the highlights.

We left Promontory and drove on a 16 mile dirt road through nowhereville. We did see this antelope.

At the end of the road we came to the Spiral Jetty. This is a piece of art work created by Robert Smithson,

We hiked down and stood on it.

I always thought it was white so it was cool to see it was black.

Here is some video of us trying to figure out where we were exactly on the lake. I'm still not quite sure about everything.

We tried to walk over to a linear jetty but Brandon started to get bit by little sand flies. In just a few minutes they really ate up his arms. So we got back in the jeep and headed back. On the way back we drove by some historic railroad grade. You can sort of see it in this picture. It's the brown hill in the bottom part.

We also drove by this arch that Lake Bonneville formed.

On the way home we stopped at Willard Bay State Park to use our park pass that we bought last year one last time. The sun was so warm and the water was so clear. We thought, "where was this paradise all week?"

We fed the girls and ate the rest of our trail mix.

At home we had Little Caesar's Pizza.

And that was the end of our eight day vacation to northern Utah. The nice thing was we still had two more days before Brandon had to go back to work. We spent them doing laundry and sleeping.

Vacation Day Seven: The sun eventually came out

By this point in our vacation we have given up on ever seeing the sun again. It has rained for almost 4 days straight. So when I found out my friend Melisa was going to be in Salt Lake for some medical tests I was willing to give up on planned stuff - which was all outside stuff anyway- and go see her. Friday was supposed to be our "Salt Lake City" day, but we started it out in Sandy with Melisa.

Melisa is my friend from my old job. We sat by each other for several months and found out that we have roughly the same sense of humor and political views. Her now three year old was in the NICU for a week, so she could really empathize with me when my girls were in special care. She came and visited me twice while we were living in the hospital. Taking time out of our vacation to see her was the least I could do. We enjoyed talking. She is going through some really hard things medically, but she has such a good sense of humor about the whole thing. Read this blog post to see what I mean.
I probably would have stayed all day with Melisa, but she had to leave for a doctor's appointment. Brandon and I figured that since we were in the southern part of the valley we should try our luck with Kennecott again. So we drove over there. This time we were lucky and we were able to go into the visitors center. (I have to add that all day on the 19th I was waiting for something bad to happen. That is the day that last year I experienced what I thought was a miscarriage. The only bad thing that happened this year was the power was out at the visitors center)We enjoyed watching videos about the copper mining process. We saw some more Olympic medal replicas because the metal for the medals all came from this mine.
Then we braved the wind and looked at the mine. Brandon hadn't been to the mine since the early 90's he says it is a lot squarer down at the bottom.
Here is some video of just how huge it is.

After the mine we drove to Salt Lake City. We wanted to take a tour of the Cathedral of the Madeleine. However, we had the girls in the stroller and there were about 20 stairs in front of the church. So we opted to go to Temple Square. We fed the girls in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. (Did you know it is 100 years old this year?)
And then we went across the street to the Conference center to get the roof tour that we skipped on Sunday. The girls were much happier this time. Charlotte kept smiling at the tour guide.

I haven't been on the roof since I was about 17. I really liked being up there. I wish you could go up there without a tour guide, but I'll take what I can get.
We headed south four blocks to the City and County Building. Every third weekend in May this is the site for the Living Traditions Festival. Brandon and I randomly went to this the day after we got married. We have always wanted to go back, but we have always been out of town.
We ate Pakistani food which was so good. I loved the pita bread and am craving some right now.
We walked around and saw people demonstrate crafts like making bobbin lace, and European style egg dying. We watched cultural dancing. It was all really interesting and made us feel like we were part of a bigger world.
After having our cultural fill we got back in the jeep and started driving up to Ensign Peak. We randomly drove by the Weeping Virgin Tree. The tree is located on 700 South near 200 East. We'd read about the tree but didn't plan to go see it. Apparently the image of the Virgin Mary appeared in this tree in 1997. It's become a shrine of sorts. In fact, as we stopped to take this picture someone drove up and dropped something off at this tree.
We continued on to Ensign Peak. Hiking this small hill has been on our to do list forever. It was a very pretty hike. Some fellow hikers took this picture of us on top. It was windy on top, but at least it wasn't rainy.
Here is a video I filmed while we hiked down. If you listen carefully you can hear Charlotte laughing as Brandon walks.


And here is a picture of the guidebook we used during our trip it is called Utah Curiosities by Brandon Griggs. We checked it out from the library. It is hilarious and made a laugh as we planned out interesting things to see. We had it on the dash board of the jeep the whole trip and we probably looked like such tourists. Which was kind of the point.
When we got back to the Sycamore Suites the girls were in a really happy mood. Here is an overly long video of Brandon making them laugh. It was so funny I couldn't stop filming or edit it down.

Vacation Day Six: Snow and a Show

We slept really well despite the constant rain all night. FYI We didn't sleep with the girls between us. They slept on a fluffy blanket next to us. We brought them into bed with us when we fed them so we didn't have to get out of bed.

I had hoped that since it rained all night the morning would be clear. Instead it started snowing! Here is a video that shows how the weather progressed throughout the night.

As we lay in bed and listened to the snow hit our tent we decided that we really didn't want to have oatmeal for breakfast. We decided that the best thing to do would be to pack up camp as quickly as possible and head to the nearest Burger King for breakfast.

So when we finally crawled out of our warm blankets we packed up everything as quick as we could. Our tent was even wetter than it had been on Tuesday, and the air mattress was wet on the bottom, but we were warmer because we had dressed better. We got everything packed and drove down Provo Canyon. We stopped and took this picture of Bridal Veil Falls from our car. Then we kept driving.

We arrived at Burger King at about 11:10 which meant we had just missed Breakfast. So we got hamburgers instead. I'm wearing my hat in this picture because I have horrible hat hair.

We had sort of planned to drive the Alpine Loop road, but we figured that it was probably closed due to snow. We went to the next best place to enjoy the outdoors, Cabela's! We checked out all the stuffed animals on display.

This is how we transported Charlotte and Lydia. The each got a cart. I love the little ears on their jackets.

The girls especially loved the fish.

Here is a video of them with the fish. (Yep I'm still wearing the hat)

After Cabela's we headed over to the Kennecott Copper Mine. The workers at the bottom of the hill told us that the power was out at the visitors center. We were welcome to go up to the lookout, but we couldn't go to the visitors center. We decided to save the mine for another time. We drove to my parents house where we took showers. Brandon took a nap on the floor.

Lydia learned how to roll over from her back to her front. This is a video we shot on another day, but she did it first at my parents house.

We left the girls with my parents and went out on a date. We went to the Desert Star Theatre. We saw Sheer Luck Holmes. It was hilarious. The last time I was at Desert Star I was in high school. Brandon had never been there. We had a great time. We also ordered dinner there. We had wraps and they were so delicious.

We picked up the girls and went back to our apartment - I mean Sycamore Suites. We pulled out the tent and hung it on the balcony again. I'm sure our neighbors were thinking, "Didn't that tent just get dried off."

Vacation Day Five:

When we got up on Wednesday morning we weren't sure where we would sleep that night. We had planned to camp again, but we weren't excited to repeat Tuesday's wet awakening. The sky was cloudy, but we hoped that the day would clear up. So we folded up the tent that had only just dried out and packed our jeep with all the camping gear.

This was our "Park City" day. Our first stop was the Utah Olympic Park. We could have walked around the whole complex and viewed the sites for bobsledding, luge, skeleton, ski jumping, etc. However, it was rainy outside so we contented ourselves with inside things.
The visitors center has a skiing museum on the bottom floor. It had some really cool interactive displays. This one showed what it was like to do downhill skiing. Upstairs is is a museum with stuff from the 2002 Winter Olympics. These were the mascots. The white beaver looking animal was used during part of the opening ceremonies. The banners behind Brandon are replicas of the giant banners that hung on the buildings of downtown Salt Lake. Brandon is watching a little movie about the making of the Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals. And here are some replicas of the medals. I remember this display was in OC Tanners' window downtown during the Olympics. I've kind of always wondered what happened to it. After getting all nostalgic about the Olympics we left the visitor's center and drove to Park City. Neither one of us had ever actually been to Park City. In fact, I'd always assumed I could see it from I-80. We had planned to walk up and down main street and window shop. The weather had other plans for us though. It was basically snowing so we were happy to just drive down the street and take this picture.
We were getting hungry and wanted to make it to our lunch stop as soon as possible. We stopped for lunch at the Dairy Keen in Heber City. We went here because it has a model train that goes around the ceiling. I'm kind of a mild train buff so as soon as I heard about this place I knew we had to go here to eat.

I even filmed the train going around the room. One day I want to do something like this in my family room.

We bought hamburgers and shakes for lunch. We fed the girls their bottles and then gave them their first tastes of ice cream. Lydia enjoyed it so much she started licking Brandon's hand.
After the Dairy Keen we drove around the valley in the Homestead Area. In the middle of this picture you can see a little dark hill. We drove up a road that wound all the way up the hill.
At the top of the hill was a monument for war veterans. It was really cool. From the hill we could see the airport so we headed out there. There was some sort of museum there, but it wasn't open. We could have called the number and the people from the main part of the airport would have come and open the museum, but we didn't do that. Mainly because we just wanted a little break. We did look at this airplane.

Here is a video of us taking a break in the car.

The girls were really cute. And I had fun taking their pictures. Here is Charlotte.

And here is Lydia. They are 6 1/2 months old.

Throughout the day we had been debating what to do about where to sleep. It had been raining most of the day and we didn't want to set up our tent in the rain. But we didn't want to waste the money we had used to reserve our campsite either. We decided to set up the air mattress in the jeep and sleep in there. However, the sky sort of cleared up when we got to our campsite and it stopped raining. So we set up the tent.

Brandon got the fire going.

We were camping at Deer Creek State Park. The reason we picked this place is that it is one of the few northern Utah campgrounds that is open in May. Most people come here to go fishing.

We had hot dogs and corn on the cob for dinner. We planned really easy meals for our camping trips because we didn't know what it would be like camping with the twins. I'm glad we did that because the girls took up a lot of our time. Here is Brandon chilling out with Charlotte. I think I'm holding Lydia, but she might be sleeping in the tent. Here is a video of Lydia. You can see that we got smart and packed our winter coats for this camping trip.

We made s'mores and enjoyed the evening.

After that we went into the tent. The girls needed one last bottle. So we gave that to them. I made sure I had water to sleep with to keep warm for the girls morning bottles.

Lydia fell asleep fairly quickly, but Charlotte wanted to stay up for a bit. So Brandon and I played cards until she started acting tired. Then we all went to bed. It started raining soon after we turned off the lantern.