Spontaneous Vacation

My sweet husband has spent a LOT of time on the road this summer.  He had two weeks away which were both vacations, planned months ago.  One of course was the week we spent in San Diego.  He also spent a week with Cap in Yellowstone - his assignment is to do the blogging on that one.  I'm excited for Troy to write his first ever blog post.  But the week before he went to Yellowstone, he got a last minute assignment from his company to go to Virginia.  So the week before he went on a major canoe trip he was across the country for six days.  He had less than 24 hours to prepare for a week in the woods.  It was a hectic 24 hours, trust me.  Now he's been home from that for a few days and low and behold....work is sending him back to Virginia next week.  Poor guy, his poor kids and....poor me!  We miss each other being apart this much!

During the week Cap and Troy were away on their adventure, I was feeling like I needed a little something to break up the week without the boys, since we had already had so many days without daddy.  I looked at our calendar and realized that we had just enough time to squeeze in a quick trip to St. George for a girls-only trip.  I'm so glad we went.  Yes, sometimes I'm hesitant to visit St. George in the dead of summer, but we had such a good time.

We took off on Monday evening after a full day of running errands and spending some time with my mom. We arrived late in the evening, but not so late that my nieces were already asleep.  They were in bed, but not asleep, and best of all, they were totally not expecting us.  Peter and Sheri were sneaky and didn't tell them we were coming - it was so fun to tip toe in there and surprise them. I wish I had filmed their faces as they lit up in happy surprise.

On Tuesday we had an extremely pleasant trip to the city pool where Skippidy learned that she really and truly hates the hydrotube.  I'm not sure I'll be able to get her to go down again for at least another summer or two.  Bitty, however,  threw herself down the tube time after time for our entire visit.

On Wednesday Sheri took us to the Pinecreek Swimming Hole in Zion National Park.  What a treat that was!  I'm sure from now on that my kids will be begging to go there.  I'm not sure if they enjoyed the mossy rock slide or the tadpole catching more, but either way, I have a feeling we have many visits to this magical spot awaiting us.  My little niece Sienna even got me to jump off a little wall with her - enjoy my very dignified video below.

The visit was short but full of great things like long conversations with my brother, a movie date with my brother and the girls to see Minions (okay, I confess, that was not my favorite movie ever), lots of treat-runs with Sheri, late night conversations, a quick visit to my friend Marsha, hours of happy cousin time and just enough heat to chase us back to Salt Lake in the nick of time.  Just kidding.  It wasn't actually that hot.