Reunions - part 2

After seeing the dinosaurs we headed back to more family reunion-ing.  On July 3rd we went to see the whoosh-kaboom fireworks with two families of cousins.  We found the perfect spot and the kids and I had a lot of fun.  It is definitely more fun with cousins.  It's fun to be in Utah on July 4th.  It is a real holiday there complete with fireworks and parades and flags.  At home you hardly notice that it is anything special until the sun goes down then the neighborhood erupts with illegal fireworks for a little while.

 

On the 4th we headed up to Brigham City for a picnic and reunion with all of my cousins on my Dad's side of the family.  It was fun to see them.  Mom had fun activities for the kids, large and small.  The best activity was simply a stack of appliance boxes and rolls of tape.  It became a fort or city of something.  The kids had a lot of fun with it.

Then since it was an extremely hot day, Grandma broke out a box of squirt bottles.  People got wet.

 

The parachute made an appearance.  Mom has had it for many years now, but the kids still have fun with it.

 

On Friday the local museum had a quilt show so we took some of the kids to see what it was all about.  I would like to say that they spent their time carefully examinine each amazing piece of art.

But they looked like this sometimes too, completely absorbed in a little screen.

Saturday was the tour of historic Box Elder County.

The first stop was Promontory, the site of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads to create the first transcontinental railroad.  This is about 30 minutes from Brigham City.  On summer Saturdays and holidays they bring out the trains and have reenactors there who do a short streamlined version of the ceremonies on the actual day on May 10, 1869.  (These aren't the original trains, but they still look really cool.)  They had people there portraying Leland Stanford and other dignitaries.  This was one of Buddy Boy's favorite parts of the trip.  This surprised me a bit, but he really loves history.  I had checked out a couple of kids books on the transcontinental railroad from the library to read beforehand so that the visit would have some context and meaning.  It is one thing to see historic sites.  It is quite another to understand why it is interesting and important.

It was fun to see my Jr. High shop teacher there.  He has been doing this for decades.

Buddy Boy got to hold the real replica golden spike and sit at the telegraph table.  He was quite excited.  He even practiced a bit of Morse code at the telegraph operator's table.

 

Kayak

I went away for a few days and guess what showed up in my living room.  It stayed there the wholel time the kids and I were gone and then when we returned it made its way to the back yard.  There were many adventurous trips down roaring rapids taken that week.

 

 

It also doubled as a lounge chair.

 

This week we finally took it out for its intended purpose.  Well, almost.  It is intended to carry one person.  We stretched it a bit and seriously pushed the weight limit but everyone managed to stay relatively dry, for a while at least.

We were having fun in the calm quite yacht harbor and then Dad got adventurous and wanted to bring it in to the surf.

 

He did pretty well, but ended up pretty wet.  He did manage to save his glasses, but not the hat.  Then he tried it again and again and again.  We played in the surf and sand and had a great evening.

 



Reunions - part 1

It seemed like as soon as we got home from out trip to Washington it was time to climb back in the car and head to Utah for The Reunions.  We had three family reunions as well as visits with friends planned in the week and a half we were there.  I actually don't mind driving across the wide open spaces of Nevada.  It is just so big.  We had planned on staying in Reno the first night, but our luck from our first trip held and the rodeo was in town.  Our friends were out of town and the hotels were full.  We made our obligatory stop at Cabela's for the laser shooting range and kept moving on another two and a half hours to Winnemucca.

 

After spending another day in the car we arrived at our cousins house.  In the perfect ending to the day we went on a little hike to a waterfall.  It was wonderful.

Buddy Boy was in adventure boy heaven.  We have beaches, but we don't have streams and waterfalls.  It was so much fun to see both kids enjoying it so much.  The water and rocks were fantastic, but he was wishing he had a pan to get some gold. Never mind we were on the wrong mountain range. 

My sister-in-law wanted bees, so the have bees.  It is pretty cool to see the bees doing their thing.

 

Reunion number one was with my cousins on my Mom's side.  We had a picnic and went swimming at Cherry Hill campground.  It is always a fun day there.

 

After a weekend in one place and reunion number one we headed out again to visit my long time friend.  After driving across Nevada the scenery on the way to Roosevelt seemed positively lush by comparison.  When I first saw it it had seemed so baren.  We met when I lived out in the Uintah Basin for a couple of summers for 20 years ago.  I was working for Indian Health Services on the reservation.  Wow, it seems crazy that it was that long ago.  How did all that time fly by.  Now we are in a very different phase of life, but still have a good time together. 

 

My Girl is a paleontologist, just ask her, she'll tell you all about it.  So we took the chance to go out to Dinosaur National Monument and see real dinosaur bones.  The quarry out there is quite impressive.  We took a picnic and ate at the cabin site of a woman who lived there for 50 years, until 1964.  This cabin made me think of the cabin my grandfather grew up in.  This cabin would have been built at the time he was a little boy.  We have a few old photos of the house/cabin he lived in and it looks a lot like this.  It wasn't an easy way to live.  He grew up on a farm in Ioka just outside of Roosevelt.  My friend's dad had a farm in the same little place.  They knew each other and were in boy scouts together.  This makes me practically family.

 

Then it was dinosaur time.  I really liked that you could get up close and personal with the bones. You could touch them and hug them and measure then to your hearts content.  Just no climbing.

After seeing the bones, it was back to Vernal and the dinosaur museum there.  It was a good little museum with life sized replicas of prehistoric animals outside.

When we got back home it was time to hatch "dinosaur eggs".  We didn't realize that the dinosaurs were in little tiny pieces.  It was a bit tricky to find the pieces and then not lose them.  A little Superglue helped hold it all together.  It also glued grey dust to my fingers.

 

 

Out of all of the fun things we saw, I think the kids may have enjoyed the trampoline the best.