Zion

Today we made the relatively short drive from Las Vegas to Zion National Park, near Springdale, Utah. Before we went to the park, we stopped for lunch in Springdale at the Whiptail Grill, which is a Mexican restaurant in a former gas station. Springdale was actually super cute and had a lot of good dining options which is not always the case near a national park, so that was exciting. The food was good and after that we made our way into the park.

The park is really beautiful and, unfortunately, no camera can really capture the scope of things. The cliffs/rocks are huge and magnificent.

Weekends in November, especially Thanksgiving weekend, are quite peak times at the park so they do not allow you to drive your car through. Instead, you have to take the shuttle. We are staying on-site, so we can drive our car in, but there is not parking this late in the day except at the hotel so we still took the shuttle to the trailheads.

The first trail we did was Weeping Rock. This was short, but steep, but the view at the top made it worth it.

Next we did the Riverside Walk. This is super flat and paved and easy and offered some great views of the river. I would have liked to do the whole thing, but it gets dark here pretty early and we were running out of daylight. The Riverside Walk leads to The Narrows, which is probably the most popular trail in the whole park. If Jason and I were alone, we would definitely do this hike or at least part of it. With kids it's not feasible because of all the wading, but I would have liked to at least see the beginning of it.

We bought a hiking backpack to carry Hannah and she really loves it. She calls it her stroller and tells Jason to "push her" in it. However, Clara got tired before we were done. Luckily Jason was just telling me he wanted to work out on this trip, so he didn't mind too much when he was carrying Clara in his arms and Hannah on his back. But after awhile we decided Hannah should maybe walk. Clara is actually super easy to carry because she is very light and holds on well, but since Hannah hadn't set foot on the ground, we decided to make her try it. At first she was really unhappy about the backpack situation. But then she perked up and enjoyed walking the last part of the trail.

 Jason went and got us dinner at Pizza and Noodle and brought it back. The town is really close to the park, but it took awhile to get there because it is very dark and plus there are all these deer near the road who are not remotely cautious. Like this guy, who didn't even care when Jason took his picture.

We enjoyed our dinner in the room and watched Despicable Me on tv. We had a super fun day and hope to do more here tomorrow before heading home.