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What can I say, it was amazing!  I may have mentioned it before but, one of the things I loved about this trip was how different each area was.   In just one way, in Zion you start at the bottom and hike up.  Makes it nice for the return.

In Bryce, you start at the top and make your way down.  The decent is great.  You start to see the real size of the canyon as you feel smaller and smaller.

And at the bottom its almost a different world.  As you’d expect each trial had sign.  But they also had a Benchmark (metal disc) on the sign to get a rubbing of.  The challenge in Bryce is to bring at least three rubbings back to show you Hiked the Hoodoos.  We would have loved to ‘collect them all’  but only had time for the three.  For this we rewarded ourselves with some ‘I hiked the Hoodoos’ t-shirts.

Then the accent.

We chose a more gradual accent the second day but either way what goes down must come up.  These were probably the more challenging hikes and the kids did great.

Once the trails were done we headed down the main road to see some other views.  We didn’t quite make it to the end before the sun set but we saw some other great sites.

Natural Bridge was one of those on our list.  We took along with us a great resource from True North on Bryce Canyon.  We really enjoyed being able to see these sites with information from a creation pint of view.

On my birthday we toured around the area and did some exploring.  We came across the Duck Creek area and even found a cute little visitor center. We had seen signs about Mammoth Caves and inquired within.  The gentleman there gave us this great map and we were off. The “road” through this area was questionable at times.  The recent rains also had us a little nervous.  One thing we don’t have on our van is 4-wheel drive.  And we won’t mention all the turns that weren’t on the map.  Thankfully they kept putting out these signs to keep us moving forward. We loved seeing these Pronghorn roaming around.  There was a little heard of about 7 of these guys grazing. We finally made it!  We had a nice little walk round the area before heading into the cave.  Ok, I’ll be honest.  We are apparently directionally challenged and were searching for the huge hole in the ground.  Yes, that one you see below.  The one we could have thrown a rock into from our car.  Thats the one.  Oh well, it made our trip just that much more memorable.  And we saw some great views from the edge of the mountain. ‘Mammoth’ in this case did not refer to the height of these caves. The shorties of the group were able to go in with no problem but those over four feet had some trouble.  Especially with the additional baby on the back.  So, the spelunking adventure was a little shorter than expected but, still fun memories. We headed back to the hotel for some teriyaki chicken and cheesecake Thanks a lot honey…  🙂 See you next time!

On the road to Bryce Canyon we came across this little place.  It was a fun, quick stop to get out and stretch our legs. It also gave us a taste of what we would encounter later.

At each of the parks the kids would get their Junior Ranger books and work toward earning their badges.

The ranger at this stop was great.  He was so excited the kids were working on their books and went through each step with them before giving their badge to them.