Summertime is Here Again

Which means we take off into the unknown and do something splendid. This year that began with a drive to the parent's home in Utah to collect our Ellie-girl and then drop the kids off for a time to alternate between grandparents' homes. The couple days before we took off on an adults-only adventure were fairly significant, even though I haven't many pictures to prove it. You'll just have to trust me.

It all started with ice cream:

Not just any ice cream, but SubZero ice cream frozen by liquid nitrogen. Neat idea, but somewhat lacking in flavor since it's all made from a powdered ice cream base and tastes about as good as that. The experience was fun, and it was a precursor to a necessary family conversation, but we'll get to that later.

That Saturday was the American Fork Canyon half marathon which we were registered to run with my in-laws. I had been really excited for the race until about a month prior.

The girls were able to make signs to cheer on family members and stand near the finish to cheer people on.

Ellie ran the last 0.2 mile with her dad. She was crazy excited to see him and it took but moments for her to take off and grab his hand.

The girls were really filled with anticipation and a decent degree of patience as they watched for Grandma to finish.

Jim finished around 1:41 and Jim's dad did really well, finishing under 2:00. Me? I seriously rocked the Casbah. Check it out below!! New PR 1:45:19!!! That's like an entire hour improvement for me!

Just kidding!

I ended up giving my spot to a cousin so I guess *technically* I don't get to claim the time. It was a 20 minute improvement over her PR though so I don't really want to take that joy away from her anyway. As for why I didn't run, as we had Ellie tell Grandma Debbi the night before, it was because her daddy knocked me up. We told the girls at the park over ice cream and then had them each make one of the announcements to the grandparents. Suffice it to say no one was disappointed that I chose to not run the half.

Saturday afternoon we took off for the hills on our grown up road trip. The first stop was Jim's grandparents in Idaho then we drove through the Grand Teton's on our way to Devil's Tower in Wyoming. We went to the Teton's last summer but didn't take a single picture of the mountains so this route was chosen specifically to mend that error.

I feel better knowing that you are now looking at the above picture and not just assuming I'm getting fat... even if I still feel that way sometimes.

Devils Tower is a sacred sight to the Lakota Indians and at several places around the tower there were trees tied with these cloth prayer bundles. It was pretty neat to see even though I do not understand the true significance of them.

The tower was pretty neat. I loved all the columnar jointing and found it really fascinating. Geology rocks.

There are two trails around the tower and we traversed both of them. The longer trail actually took us out of sight of the tower for quite a while and was very different than I expected but took us through several of these hilly fields. I really enjoyed it, even if hiking in my five fingers meant that I was on my toes the whole time and had insanely sore calves for the next 2-3 days.

We camped at the KOA adjacent to the park and had an amazing view of the tower from our tent door and a spacious grassy lot to camp on. It was pleasantly surprising and definitely worth the visit. When we left Idaho, Jim's grandpa jokingly challenged us to count the antelope and we made it our mission to do just that. Wyoming's total: 241.