Travel Our Year Away: Always something...

Today was a fairly low key day. We ate breakfast in our room, since it had a fridge and microwave and hot water (coffee pot) for oatmeal, and we had picked up some fruit for the morning, last night while we were out to dinner. We had thought about staying another night at our hotel, but they were booked solid for the night, so we packed up and headed out.

Only to find that when the boys had gone out to get things that they couldn't live without the night before, they had left the interior lights on in the car, and the battery was dead. Seriously? Luckily I had a really nice pair of jumper cables and there were a few macho BS guys smoking and joking in the parking lot, so I was able to talk them into jumping the car.

Only the jumper cable has a locking mechanism on it, and part of that had cracked and the cables wouldn't lock in place. Seriously? We rigged them tight using ponytail rubber bands, and got the car started. )sigh(

We left our hotel five minutes from the gates of Zion National Park, and headed back to the park where we hiked the Emerald Pool trails, with the intent of doing just the lower, but it was much shorter than we expected so we went all of the way to the uppermost pool. It was refreshing, and we worked a little on giving H some responsibility on some of the more treacherous parts of the path - he was above B on the uphill to help her up the bigger steps and below her on the downhills to help her with some of the bigger jumps down. It worked and he felt good being responsible for her.

We came back down to the Visitor's Center and the kids finished their first National Park Junior Ranger books, and got Junior Ranger badges. They really liked that.

By that time, it was late in the day and we were again homeless, so we headed out of Zion in search of a decent hotel for less than a fortune, which we found, about 20 miles away. The brand new hotel has a nice hot tub open outside to sooth those sore hiking muscles and a fridge and microwave in the room and laundry on site (yeah, that path was a little muddy and slippery and, well, we needed laundry tonight).

Off to bed and another lovely day tomorrow. Going to check in with the Ford dealer again, which will steal a little of my sunshine, I am sure, but we have to decide what we'll do next, and where we are headed. I did leave my favorite pillow at the hotel in Cameron the other night, which makes me very sad, but it is so remote that I'm not sure I think it is worth going back for it. Of course, the kids still want to hit the four corners, so perhaps just for a little while...