Garden of the Gods and into Utah

After spending a second night in Manitou Springs, we woke to a bright, sunny day.  Following breakfast, we decided to squeeze in a visit to the Garden of the Gods since the weather was so nice.

B-saurus had discovered that if she yelled it echoed

B-saurus wearing my sunglasses

Big kids

You could easily spend several hours here wandering around and taking the trails.  We had a long day of driving ahead of us so we only spent about 45 minutes on one of the shorter trails.  If you're in the Colorado Springs area, I definitely recommend checking Garden of the Gods out.  A plus...it's free!

We headed back onto the road, headed towards Utah.  Malone kept asking when we'd see the Rocky Mountain peaks with snow and started to get upset when she didn't see any.  After a while, she fell asleep.  Of course, after she fell asleep we started to see snow on the peaks. 

 

First of 6 tunnels through the mountains

Snow!

I ended up waking Malone so that she wouldn't miss seeing the snow.  She was disappointed that we couldn't be up close to the snow and play in it.

There were a lot of dead pine trees throughout CO because of a pine bark beetle infestation.

Waterfall alongside the road

We stopped in Vail, CO for lunch and I have to say I was under impressed with the area.  The kids were starving and wanted McDonald's and because of what I'm assuming is a town ordinance there were no obvious signs.  There were also several roundabouts that if you didn't know where you were headed were confusing.  The GPS came to the rescue and we finally ate lunch.  Malone thought the ski lifts visible on the mountains were neat.  When she saw people riding one up the mountain, she begged to go on one.  Not this trip.

Heading into western CO and into Utah, the shape of the mountains change and the region is more arid.

Utah was renamed "Puke-tah" and "Poo-tah" by us.  Kakes had started feeling poorly when we crossed over into Utah and we ended up pulling over so she could be sick.  She is prone to car sickness but she had been doing fantastic up until then.  She might be coming down with something since even after a night in the hotel she still isn't feeling 100%.  B-saurus started in with her "I have to go POO!" chant not long after so we had to make another emergency roadside stop. 

Kakes not feeling well with Utah mountains in the background

Ask B what she did in Utah and she'll reply, "I pooped in Utah!"

Our original plan was to stop in Price, Utah which is about 120 miles from Salt Lake City.  They have a prehistoric museum that has dinosaur bones in it that I thought would be fun to visit.  But our luck in finding hotel rooms without reservations had ended.  The town had several different activities going on and the hotels were mostly booked up.  Our choices were a room with only one bed or a smoking room.  One bed was not going to do it and the smoking room was horribly stinky.  Ga-Ga got on the phone and made a reservation for a hotel in Springville which is right before Provo, UT.  So, we grabbed some dinners and headed farther north.

On a side note, smoking is apparently quite common in this part of the country.  In CO, there were ashtrays everywhere in the towns and smoking rooms in most of the hotels.  I don't think I've seen a public ashtray at the Beach in years.  It was kind of ironic in CO as I tend to think of the state as an outdoorsy, environmentally friendly place yet a lot of the locals were standing around smoking.  Don't me wrong, I have no problem with a person smoking but it's kind of a turnoff when you're in a pristine place and there's smelly ashtrays everywhere.

We made it to our destination for the night around 9pm.  It was a suite with 2 Queen beds and a pullout couch.  It was nice that I didn't have to haul the air mattress upstairs and inflate it.  We're going to take it easy today since Kakes is still feeling poorly.  I'm hoping to check out Great Salt Lake and possibly take the kids swimming in it.  We probably won't drive too far today.  We're actually ahead on our time line so there's room to take it slowly.  

Heading to Springville