Bryce Canyon

One of Craig's friends that he worked with down in Brazil had been dreaming about a motorcycle road trip in the southwestern part of the United States.  This year, he let us know that he and his wife were going to do it!  The farthest north they were going to be stopping was in Bryce Canyon. We decided that 4 hours away wasn't too bad, so we made an overnight trip out of it to go down and meet up with Fernando and his wife while they were in Utah for a day.

We went down Thursday night, and left a little before 8 (Calder's bedtime) thinking that he would just sleep the whole way down.  Well, we were very wrong in our assumption.  He only slept 1 hour (maybe?) the whole way down.  Sorry little guy!

We stayed in a little motel that night, and left the next morning to go hike in Bryce Canyon.

 I had never been there before. It was stunning!

 Calder got the easy ride.

He even got a little nap in, which was fabulous.  (probably because of his lack of sleep the night before. He was exhausted!)

 Family picture!  (Calder is in awe at the cliffs maybe?)

 We let him get out to climb some stairs - one of his favorite things to do.

 We stopped by the museum after we were done hiking, and had changed out of our dirty clothes.  That was probably the longest we have ever spent in a museum, just because Calder LOVED walking back and forth between all the little animals that were on display.  (He is walking like crazy now!  Sooo fun!!)

We found out Fernando and his wife would actually be coming into Cedar City that evening, so we headed over there to meet up with them.

While we waited for them to arrive, we found a fun park to play at, walked around a few stores, waited to hear from Fernando, walked around the SUU campus, sat in the grass and had a snack, waited some more to hear from Fernando, and then drove around - which is when the next monumental event happened: 100,000 miles on our car.

So, it turns out that Fernando and his wife got a little lost on their way, so they turned around to backtrack and find the right road.  They didn't get into Cedar City until pretty late.  We ended up (finally) eating dinner without them at 8:30 pm, and drove by their hotel once more to see if they had made it.  And they had!  So we spent a little time chatting with them. It was fun to meet them (for me) and fun for Craig to see Fernando again and catch up.  They were loving their trip, and had taken almost 500 pictures every day! 

We headed back home between 10:00 and 10:30 pm.  We had to make it home that night because Craig had a commitment the next morning. We had to pull off a couple of times to get a quick 10 minute nap in to re-energize.  Thankfully, Calder slept the whole way this time and we made it home safely.  

We decided a couple of things:

1. We are going to plan more day/overnight trips because they are super fun, pretty inexpensive, and planning isn't too hard.  

2. We probably won't start to drive home that late.  We are just grateful we made it home.  I guess we are just used to going to bed pretty early these days!