Our First Family Vacation

In honor of both Anthony and I graduating, we declared the need for our first ever family vacation, just our family. We decided to take the boys to Salt Lake to see Hoglo Zoo and to also see Temple Square. Way adventurous, I know, but for two little boys who do not travel well this was big! We talked about for months and got Peter so excited to see elephants and giraffes. We left Thursday morning and traveled all the way to Salt Lake having to make only two stops. Early this summer we bought a portable DVD player at a garage sale for a steal ($10) and that saved our lives. The boys watched movies all the way to Salt Lake, plus took a nap! Our first stop was to This is the Place monument. Neither Anth or I had ever saw it before and decided it would be fun. Come to find out they have a heritage park there that is like a mini pioneer village where kids can do all kinds of crafts and other activities that are related to the pioneers. It was a lot of fun. I would totally recommend it to anyone!

Us standing in front of the monument! It just happened that it was Pioneer Day as well.


This was one of our favorites! It just circles around a little lake but it was fun!
Here we are waiting for us to go on our ride. The boys really were excited. I think that they were just a little bit scared of it all!

The boys at the old school house pretending to be in school! It was really hot that day and most of the buildings weren't air conditioned! Just like the pioneer's day!They had some people there who were dressed up in pioneer clothing and pretend that they were pioneers. It was awesome!

This is us at Denny's! It was right next to our hotel! How awesome is that!

Thursday night we noticed that Peter's eye was starting to swell shut. He was bitten by a mosquito on Wednesday night and his forehead had swollen up but it wasn't until Thursday night that his eye swelled shut! This is him on Friday morning! We decided that an emergency trip to Urgent Care was necessary and attempted to try and find one. Almost two hours later we were back at the hotel with a prescription to help stop the swelling. Come to find out, Peter is allegoric t to mosquitos and that his eye swelled shut because of gravity. The swelling basically fell into his eye. So on top of being blind, he got to be a cyclops! Poor guy! We felt horrible for him. The whole point of the trip was so that he could SEE elephants and now he couldn't see ten feet in front of him.

The boys at Hoglo Zoo and a lovely shot of White Alligator. They are very rare and very powerful!

Us outside of the Alligator hut. My family came with us to Hoglo Zoo and we were waiting for them to come out. Peter is looking through the map trying to find the elephants.

Andrew succumbed to the need for a nap during the bird show that we watched. He slept for almost all of the zoo. Oh, well! He probably won't be able to remember much of it anyways.

The giraffes were my favorite part! I could remember them from when I was a kid! They had a baby there! I forgot how big they were!

My brother Glen and his resemblance to the gorilla! Pretty close!

Anthony testing out the hand gauge! Anthony had the longest hands in his family and so this was defiantly a temptation to try out!

And the whole reason for the trip to the zoo...the elephants! And wouldn't you know that they were working on the exhibit and so this was as close as we could get! Peter could hardly see them! I felt so bad but he got over faster then I did!

Our last day was spent on Temple Square and at the Gateway! Peter walked into the square and we began to ask him, where the temple was and he looked around and said, "I can't see it!" By this time, his eye had opened up considerably...he just won't look up high enough. That and he was looking for the Moroni statue on top.

Us in front of the Hyrum and Joseph statues!

We decided to let the boys play in the water at the Gateway before we left to go back home. They had a blast! Peter was completely drenched! Andrew was a little more timid but got into it as well.

So overall, it was alot of fun and very tiring! I think that I am still recovering! Not really! I can't wait to go back and spend more time at the Gateway. They had this really cool looking Discovery Center there, kind of like a children's museum, that I really want to take the boys too! Maybe next year!