Southern Utah

Jeff and I decided to finally take a week and go see the National Parks in Utah. We stayed ......this is where Kristina says she has writers block and Jeff gets to BLOG!!!!!! The real truth.....the Red Sox are on ESPN and I can't pull my wife away from those baseball butts!!!! So southern Utah was awesome....it was a great week. We stayed at a resort in Brian Head which is about 30 min. from Cedar City, but in the mountains at 10,000 feet elevation. The windows in our unit over looked a ridge and faced east....which made for a gnarly sunrise every morning at 6:55....this also made for a gnarly Annabelle rise every morning at about 7:05.....see the pictures! Our friends the Graves...Stratton and Erin who live in Bountiful came and played with us for a few days....they called in "siiiiiiick" it was fun for them to play hookie with us....we went to the Grand Canyon....which didn't even seem real, it was Annabelle's favorite place to run....THREE FEET FROM THE EDGE OF THE EARTH......it was a stressful walk along the north rim for mom and dad. She is so adventurous and loves nature....she even learned how to call in a chipmunk while we were at Bryce Canyon National park....click click click with her little tongue...kinda freaked mom out, we all know how much Kris loves rodents. While we were at Bryce Canyon, we got caught in a sudden hail storm....this was the first time I have ever seen rain fall below the elevation of the ground I was standing on....it was so majestic to watch the dew from heaven ascend into the canyon floor and stand there and just take it all in.....and then run like crazy with Annabelle in my arms and be soaking wet and have the windows fog up in the car!!!! see the pictures!!!! A trip through Zions park and Capitol reef were very scenic, lots of animals......MAYBE!...ask Annabelle! We actually saw a lot of deer and some antelope....we probably would have missed the antelope, but our trusty tom tom navigation system managed to get us driving our full size s.u.v. down a Nordic ski trail...don't tell the authorities! Kris thought that since we were "so close" that we should go to Arches and Canyonlands, so we did. That was a late night we returned to our resort at ohhh 2:30 in the AM. On the way home, we met our friend Amy Hunsaker at the Hogle zoo, we had hot dogs and dipped them in catsup and Dr. Pepper...yum!!!!! We saw all kinds of exotic and native wildlife...including a mountain lion that was hungry enough to eat our little Annabelle for lunch...good thing there was a fence to stop her from eating our baby...you should have seen Kris go into momma bear mode when that cat started to lick her lips. Speaking of lip smacking...later that night we met the rest of the Caldwell girls and had dinner at Hard Rock Cafe... Well, all in all it was a real fun week, and since my words can't do it justice, you can bet that Kristina will put together a gnarly picture slide show with awesome music about how great i am....it was a fast week...really fast..,.TWO speeding tickets fast. We are still finding the beautiful red dirt and pebbles in our car from our adventurous toddler sized hikes in the canyons of Utah. So I decided to make a movie instead of posting 3 thousand pictures. Please take sometime and enjoy Southern Utah with us. Sorry it is so long, just so many pictures!!! To fulfil my OCD habits it is in chronological order.