Colorado Trip Post #4

Sunday morning in Colorado, we took the kids on a walk by the river.

Grant drew pictures of things he saw along the way, like this dog.

 Rivers + boys = rocks and sticks.

They could've played here all day!

 Then we visited my sister at her in-laws home and had lunch with her.  Keith was convinced that we needed to go home by way of the Grand Canyon because the next day was National Park Day and we could get in for free.  I wasn't to keen on the idea, but I finally gave in when he told me that he looked it up on his GPS and it was only 8 hours and 7 minutes away.

So we started our journey and enjoyed the beautiful drive through south-western Colorado.  Gorgeous!  I was kind of worried though when the GPS had us go on dirt roads through farm land.  It was beautiful, but was it really the fastest route?  And the time left on our route on the GPS wasn't making sense.  I new we would lose signal on Keith's phone and we wouldn't have the GPS anymore and we didn't even have a map.  Keith assured me that we'd be fine.  Well....we lost signal.  It got dark.  And we just kept driving.  FOR-EV-ER!  We went by an elk, 2 coyotes, 2 raccoons, and a bunch of field mice.  We even ran some of those little rodents over!  Eeeww!

We were in the middle of nowhere!  We were so tired.  I vowed that I will always take a map on our trips (like I usually do).  We stopped at a gas station and Keith went to check a map.  We were on the right road, so why was it taking so long?  We'd passed 8 hours long ago.  It was really late now.  We finally made it to the entrance of the Grand Canyon (what a miracle!) and felt a sense of relief.  We'd be in our beds soon, right?  Well we just kept driving and it was SO dark.  I was convinced that an elk was going to step out at any second, or a mountain lion was going to jump on our van!  Finally we had cell phone reception so we called the hotel.  Bad news, we were still an hour away.  That was at 2:00 AM.  I started crying.  Oh, how tired I was!  Well we made it and of course our kids woke up and were super excited when we got there and Camille was making all kinds of loud happy baby sounds at 3:00 in the morning through the hotel hallway.  We all got settled after a while and slept hard.

So the next morning Keith looked at our route on his phone to figure out what went wrong.  He soon realized that the GPS had been showing us the route for WALKING not driving and that it was really 8 days and 7 hours.  HA!  No wonder!  We laughed really hard about that one.  We would not have gone that way if we'd known it would take as long as it did.  But after all that we still had a great time at the Grand Canyon and were glad that we were able to go there.  And the drive home after that would be much shorter, so that was good too.

 I'm pretty sure this was my first time to the Grand Canyon.  (Mom, is that right?)

Keith had been here as a kid.

It was so big and so neat to see.

 Boy, did I ever keep a close eye and hand on my kids here!

 Human totem-pole!

 The boys did a junior ranger workbook and little class.

 Pledging to take care of their National Forests.

 They both earned a Junior Ranger badge for all their hard work.

On the way home, we stopped by a Whole Foods market in Phoenix and got more of that delicious chicken noodle soup and sour dough bread.  Brett was so tired he wouldn't wake up to eat, but the rest of us enjoyed a not-home-made dinner at home and then went to bed!