Anniversary/Vacation

I think I feel a tradition coming on. Last year Vegas and California, this year Zion and Lake Powell. I like it. It was such a fun week! I loved spending time with my little family for a few days and then Joe's family for the rest of the week. We drove down to Hurricane, UT (a 4 hour drive) on Friday night where our sister in-law's sister was so kind to let us stay with her and even fed us breakfast in the morning. Thanks Chris and Tony! The next day we drove to Zion (a 40 minute drive) and spent the day there. From there we drove to Bryce Canyon (a 3 hour drive) and stayed at a hotel. We decided that going to the Bryce Canyon visitor's center and looking at all the tour books was enough instead of paying the $25 to get into the park. So we were on the road again (a 4 hour drive) to Lake Powell. The drive was beautiful and I was amazed at all the hundreds and hundreds of miles of untouched land. I think I really got in touch with my hippie side on this vacation. I was loving the landscape and animals. We really do live on a beautiful earth. When we got to Lake Powell we did a little swimming and ate dinner while we waited for Joe's brother Aaron to arrive. They got there around 10pm and then we loaded onto the houseboat. Aaron and Shannon were so generous in inviting us to invade on their family vacation! Thanks guys! Joe's brother Eric and his family arrived the next day.

It was a big party. In all there were 13 kids (all blondies) and 6 adults. We all slept on top of the houseboat, under the stars, and it was beautiful. Norah did so well! I was a little stressed out about her sleep schedule and stuff but hey, she slept when she needed to sleep and actually ended up taking 2 hour naps (very unlike her). It was a good experience for her to have all her cousins around. They constantly wanted to pick her up and play with her. She was well socialized. Joe did a lot of wake-boarding (I'm so sad I didn't get any pictures of him doing it) and he was really happy about that. The weather was beautiful the whole week. I was actually kind of surprised at how hot it was and after spending a little over a week in the desert I decided that I love trees and the ocean breeze. We planned on driving home (a 4 hour drive) on Thursday but ended up staying until Saturday because it was just too much fun. We pulled into town just in time for the Stadium of Fire fireworks at BYU.

OK, I just spent way too much time uploading all the pictures to facebook so to see them all you can click here. For those of you not familiar with facebook, there are three pages of pictures so you have to click "2" and "3" at the top of the page to see the rest, or you can just keep clicking "Next" at the top of each picture.