Day 13-14 Yellowstone

Well, we are home and officially done with vacation. We ended up logging 4300 miles of driving!! Whew!! I'll post a few highlights of Yellowstone.

There were some fun animals! Lots of bison walking right down the road!

A grizzly bear off the road!

An elk taking a little mid-afternoon snooze.

There were hikes up to look at waterfalls....

and hikes down (328 steps to be exact!) to waterfalls. (I liked going down better than up!)

There were amazing colors...

and an amazing lack of colors with mountains "smoking"!

There was the expected (Old Faithful)...

and the surprises....

Over and over on this trip I was reminded of God's amazing creativity and the beautiful world we live in!!

Day 12-Lotsa Driving

Well, really the only highlight of today (besides eating dinner and swimming at the hotel in Billings) was this....

This makes 41 states, and all the new states that we will collect this trip. We drove about 400 miles today, but it was a pleasant drive and actually went by quickly. Tomorrow we'll be in Yellowstone, and I don't think we will have internet connection until we get back. So, I'll update you on the Yellowstone adventures when we get back.

Day 11-The Badlands

Well, we started off the day with the exciting Wall Drug. We got the obligatory bumper sticker (even though we won't put it on our car.) The billboards were funny and it was about what you would expect it to be.

Next we continued east to The Badlands. We couldn't decided if they were pretty in an ugly way or ugly in a pretty way, but it was interesting to see.

We took a hike that originally said .25 miles round trip, but I think we went a little past that. This shows where we ended up (and we had already been hiking up a while)

Here was the view from the top.

Next we took a tour of one of the abandoned missile silos. We went down into the chamber where they waited to launch the nuclear missiles and learned about the process. I must confess I wasn't all that excited about this particular event, but it ended up being very interesting. The funniest part of the whole thing was that one of our tour guide's name was Egor Prokofiev and had a Russian accent. Turns out he is a student in Russia over here doing an internship.....or at least that is his story and he's sticking to it. Danny was pretty sure he was stealing government secrets, never mind that he wasn't even born during the cold war.

Then we headed to dinner and to the hotel for some swimming.

Day 10-Wind Cave and Mt Rushmore

This morning we went to Wind Cave National Monument. We took a tour of a great cave.

A part of this was also a buffalo range with an incredible amount of prairie dogs and pronghorn antelope. Here are a couple favorite pictures. It was beautiful country.

We had heard that if you bring carrots there was a herd of "begging burros" that would come up to your car, but we weren't quite prepared for this....

This afternoon I finally got to see Mt. Rushmore! I have been very excited to see this. It did not disappoint. Here is the classic entrance picture.

Tonight we all went swimming at the pool. A good day!

Day 9

Well, today was a less eventful day. We were doing to start the day at the Wyoming state capitol building (which I mistakenly spelled capital yesterday!) but it was closed on Saturdays.

So, we went to a Wyoming state museum which was pretty interesting. There was a scavenger hunt for the kids and they were supposed to try on a costume. The kids were feeling a little old for this, but I made them pose anyway!

Next, we drove to Scottsbluff, NE, which was a post along the Oregon Trail. They had a few exhibits and wagon display.

Of course, collecting two new states (bringing the total to 40) was a highlight! Below Danny is kissing his native soil of Nebraska (never mind that Danny has never actually lived in Nebraska, but his dad grew up there and still owns land so he was trying to convince the kids that this was his roots.)

Day 8-Denver

This morning we headed into Denver for the day. (Pam and Patty, I thought of you both several times!! I never did see Mile High Stadium, though!) We don't have many pictures from today because they don't let you take cameras into the US Mint and so we didn't carry it. We first visited the state capital building and took a quick look around. (We added it to our state capital "collection.") The Mint tour was a fun tour with funny, engaging tour guides.

After that we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. This was a GREAT museum, probably the best natural museum that we have seen. There was a great rock/mineral/gems exhibit. We always enjoy a good rock exhibit! Other favorites were several different demonstrations on what would happen if we were in space without a suit using a special vacuum chamber. We also saw a demonstration of a dissection of a sheep's brain and lung. It was very interesting!! One nice thing was a great butterfly/moth/insect display because it was a great review of what we had learned in science this year.

We are now spending the night in Cheyenne, Wyoming and we will visit their state capital tomorrow. Today brought us up to 38 states.

Day 7-Great Sand Dunes National Park/Colorado Springs

We started out the day driving an hour to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. You can imagine how my heart sank when I heard Danny wanted to hike to the top of the dune the call the appropriately named "High Dune" once I saw this....(yes, those little dots are people!)

However, once we got started, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Here is a picture from one of the ridges at the top of one of the dunes. Somehow Seth had enough extra energy to roll around! We got there pretty early, so it wasn't unbearably hot, and some spots of the sand was cool and harder and some was getting pretty hot and you would sink down in it. That was the hardest part. We are about halfway up in this picture.

We made it to the top (about a mile up, and 500 feet elevation change)!! It was a great feeling of accomplishment.

Of course, the best part of the whole thing was running down the hill at full speed! The kids even called this hike one of the most fun parts of the whole trip. It is fun when gravity works in your favor!

We then drove to Colorado Springs and went to the Air Force Academy. Danny wanted to sign Seth up, but when he saw all the young recruits going through their drills, I'm not sure he was too excited. However, after we saw the video, he thought it sounded cool to parachute out of an airplane. The chapel was even cooler than we had heard it would be.

Next, we went to the Focus on the Family headquarters. We didn't have time for a tour and most of the kids things were closed, but it was a neat facility. After that we went and spent the night with (follow the family connection, here) Danny's sister's husband's brother's house. It was very fun to get to know them and their kids better.

Day 6-Mesa Verde National Park

(Make sure to scroll down because I added pictures to the post from a couple days ago.)

Today we went to Mesa Verde National Park, which is ruins of the Anasazi tribe that built their homes right in the sides of the cliffs. We took a tour of one of the houses and it was a really fun tour. You have to start by going down this incredibly steep ladder and then up a face of the cliff (with the help of a wire railing.) You also had to crawl through a small tunnel and then climb back up again!

The houses were almost like little villages and some "pueblos" held more families than others. The house we toured was thought to be a two family home.

There were many of these ruins built into the cliff, but the biggest one is called Castle House (40 families)and we could see it from a lookout across the way. The zoom lens came in handy here!

This day was a highlight for us so far.

Next we drove a three or four hours to our hotel. We happened upon this waterfall on our way and took a short hike to the bridge. Gorgeous!!

Day 5-Bridges, Monuments, Four Corners

Yesterday, we saw a heck of a lot more rocks! It is amazing to me how many different ways there are to make rocks look cool. Every single one is different than the one before and gorgeous in its own way! We went to Bridges National Park and did four different hikes. They weren't too long, but they were pretty steep (500 feet elevation change in a half mile). But, it was well worth the hike when we got there! (Actually, the hard part was getting back up!)

We ate a picnic in a place called Gooseneck park. I bet you can figure where it got its name. It actually arches back one more time than you can see in this picture.

After bridges we went to Monument Valley, which was very different again from the other places we have been. This is a picture of the road that Forrest Gump ran on in the movie when he just kept running, so we took a picture of the road with the monuments in the background.

The next stop was the Four Corners. This was our first time in New Mexico and Colorado. It was a total tourist trap place on a Reservation. Let's just say we took our pictures, used the Honeybucket, and was out of there in about 5 minutes! For this, they charged $3 per person. You would think they could have put in a couple toilets for that.

We then drove a couple hours to our hotel in Cortez, CO and the kids swam in the pool.

Day 4-Canyonlands

(I added a couple pictures from yesterday, so scroll down)
We started the day early and ended late! But, it was well worth it on both ends of the trip. We headed to the north part of Canyonlands this morning, called Islands in the Sky. We went on several short hikes. The thing about this region that is so amazing is that every area seems to be totally different than the next thing. (I'll post pictures when I get them off our camera). We timed it so we would be done by noon and head to our next hotel for a swim and dinner before doing the south part of Canyonlands.

This part of our trip was my favorite so far. We got to the park and there was literally no one there. We saw one couple hiking as we were starting our hike. We saw one other car besides ours in the whole place. It was absolutely surreal. We were in the most amazing wide-open beautiful place and we were the only humans within miles. The temperature had cooled down and was still very warm, but completely comfortable. We timed our hike so we would be there at sunset (8:45) and it was gorgeous although covered by quite a few clouds. The hike (about 2 miles) was so great, perfect temperature, full moon, great views, total solitude and the surreal feeling of the canyon.

The drive home was not quite as fun because it was a long, windy road in the dark. We were almost hit by a deer (he came at us straight on) with a huge set of antlers and hundreds of rabbits almost lost their lives! But, we made it. I haven't looked at the pictures yet, but I'm hoping they can somehow capture the amazing night!