We were able to stay at my grandparents place in St. George which was a huge help to be able to afford such a fun trip.
The first day we left that morning and drove all the way to St. George. We unpacked our stuff at my grandmas place. It is a trailor home in a retirement community with two small bedrooms. We put the the three younger kids in one room and Brennen slept on the pull out couch in the living room. Jason and I took the other room. After we got settled we decided everyone had a lot of energy we needed to get worked out so we went to the nearby rec center to go swimming. Everyone had a great time, it was a really fun pool with part of it being outside. The weather was just right. There was a big lazy river pool Brennen would swim under water while Kiara body surfed on top of him. After swimming for a couple of hours we got dressed and did some rock wall climbing at the rec center. It was fun to watch the kids try to out-do each other. One would make it to a certain point up the wall so another one would try to get farther than that and they kept doing that until all of them except TJ (who came very close) was able to reach the top and ring the bell. After that we were all pretty tired so we rented a movie, picked up a pizza and headed back to our trailer for the night.
The next day we got up and packed a lunch and lots of water and got everyone ready to go hiking. We ended up going on about 3 different hikes in Zions and a total of 8-10 miles. The kids did so well. The weather was awesome and it wasn't super crowded. We saw waterfalls, lizards and a scorpion! All of it was so beautiful. We stopped for dinner on the way home then went to bed soon afterward, it was a very long day.
We decided not to go back to Zions the next day since it was raining in the park and decided to find some things to do in St. George. We went to the visitors center at the St. George Temple and went on a tour of a few church history sights like the tabernacle and Brigham Young's house.
After that we had lunch and then went to a park that also had a pond and a nature walk. While on the nature walk we saw more lizards and the kids caught a frog. Also while we were feeding the ducks in the pond a huge water turtle swam up to the surface. I wasn't able to get a picture but it was pretty fun seeing the turtle.
Since the weather was still good around town we headed to the Rock Cliffs Desert Reserve. This place is so awesome! There are miles and miles of rocks to climb on. It's a huge fun playground. I got a little nervous at times while the kids were climbing up rocks but we were all careful and safe and had a great time. One really cool thing is that we saw a real live owl sleeping in hole in the rocks.
A really fun pat of the trip was that the kids got along really well and spent some good quality time with each other. They were really into playing cards so when we would go back to where we were staying for some down time they would play cards and other games with each other.
The next morning we cleaned the place up and headed up back to real life. This was one of our funnest vacations yet! There is still so much to explore in Zions and other National Parks around St. George that I'm sure we will go back again.
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