Day 8 – Canyonlands

Today we let Arthur pick the day’s activities. This is a nice vacation hack when traveling with impatient boys. Give them a concrete idea of what’s involved in planning a vacation day and reap the rewards of them tolerating some activity you yourself have planned. Leo is on tap to choose activities one day at Bryce Canyon/Zion.

After consulting some books, Arthur picked two hikes–both two miles long, and strenuous, even before you add the 95-100 degree midday heat. We ended up with killer photos, close to 20,000 steps, mild sunburns, and sore muscles. Hats off to the boys for muting the complaints and powering through it. We were happy to return to the small pool at our RV park—the brilliant part is they also have a splash/shower park with shockingly cold water. This helped us recharge before checking out the uranium mining-cum-outfitting town of Moab and grabbing some pizza for dinner (also Arthur’s idea).

Canyonlands is huge, and divided into four parts: Needles, the Maze, the Rivers, and Island in the Sky, where we spent the day. The Utah sun feels huge and intense, and the sky was crystal blue. This blue contrast made the unreal red/brown rock formations seem even more extreme. Had great fun with the kids scrambling over rocks to find views and under rocks to beat the heat.

We also all wore zany hats today.  The boys got park ranger hats, and Eva got a “cooling” (n.b., not “cool”) hat. I strapped the GoPro on to a baseball cap to get some video footage that will hopefully be available soon. I’ll leave it to you to decide who wins the best hat award.

The park itself is immaculately kept, just like the others we’ve checked out. Very, very impressed with not only the national parks but also the national parks service thus far. They have to put up with all types and they do it with smiles on their faces. I was unaware that the park-going public needed this kind of guidance, but I take a degree of comfort in knowing that if there is somebody in the world who actually is this dumb, or has kids who are this dumb, the parks service is there for them, too: