Red Butte Garden & Rio Tinto

Every year Rio Tinto/Kennecott gives Eric's brother, Andy, a bunch of coupons for different activities around the valley (which we reap the benefits for because we get to go along with him a lot) and this year they also had a big party at the Rio Tinto Stadium where they showed a movie on the field and had face painting and anything to eat/drink was free. Pretty darn cool... here's Tommy with a spider on his face:
Syrena had a snake:

I was a mermaid:

A day or two later we all went to Red Butte Garden, there were cute little bunnies running around:

Here's the girls in a giant potted plant:

And the little men on a giant lizard:

This is the part they were all super excited for, the ducks there are way tame and eat right out of your hand. Cassie was prepared and had saved quarters from the whole year just to get food out of the machine to feed the ducks and she shared freely with everyone:

Our Trip To Denver

Yeah... I'm behind again, what can I say? At least I keep at it and there will come a day when I am "caught up." We had planned to go in July to visit Eric's friend Andy before he moved to Virginia, but a last minute scheduling conflict meant the trip was off... or was it? In the end we decided to go to Denver anyway. I had the time off work, as did Eric, and we had the car rented and had already told the kids. So we went on a total unplanned vacation, no hotel rooms booked and no concrete plans except that I wanted to take the kids to the King Tut exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. We drove down the first night and spent the night at the Manti house and then moved our way East from there. Here's the first pic, we stopped alongside a creek in a canyon and I snapped a couple pics of Eric and his momma:




Here's the kids on day one of the car trip: Best buddies...

I rented a mini-van so there was plenty of room for stuff and people. Here's a pic of day 2 on the road - still good little friends.

After much toiling and asking for directions - as I said, this was unplanned and I didn't even bring my usual entourage of 300 different Map Quest maps, we finally made it to the museum. The exhibit was pretty cool, although I expected the actual remains of King Tut... nope - they apparently never leave the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. There were a lot of cool things, lots of stuff from his tombs, but not what I expected. They wouldn't let you take any pictures at all during the whole tour, so I just snapped a couple of pics with the kids in front of the museum when we got done.

Here's a pic of them and Syrena's pen...

Them and Tommy's pen.... this was their idea, so don't blame me for this weirdness.

On Day 3 we went to the Denver Aquarium. It was really cool!

Syrena romancing a fish:

This are huge suckers!

They had a really cool part where you could see what a flash flood looked like. Even though there was glass separating you from the water, it was still kind of scary. After much coaxing, I finally got the kids to agree to stand right in front of it so I could get a pic of them when the flood was happening. I only got the briefest of windows, because once the water started it scared them and they would take off running:

They had one of those cool glass tunnels you could walk through with fish swimming all around you:

Here's Syrena with a tiny guppie:

My handsome husband with another little fellar:

Here's Tommy being ... Tommy:

I totally forgot to rotate this picture, so it's sideways, sorry - some Seahorses:

This picture was too fun:

Tommy posing in front of the pirhana tank... wait, where did his head go?! Oh no!!!!!

They had some animatronic animals there, here's Tommy with the orangutans:

And Syrena with a parrot:

They had some real tigers there too, but they were hard to get pictures of:

Syrena, swimming with the fishies:

This guy was posing for a good pic, so I had to post it:

Here's Tommy posing with a shark, although the shark is hard to see in the backround:

Ahh scary!

Give me some sugar baby :)

Here's the kids posing with Grandma at the end... after she'd just spoiled them in the gift shop - of course.

Here's day 4 of the car trip: No longer best buddies but at least not mortal enemies:

On our way back to Manti, we stopped at a rest stop right at sunset and the moon was already out, it looked pretty cool:

Here we are on our final day of the road trip (on our way back through to Price to go to their wave pool, which the kids saw on our way out and wanted to go to), and just in time because the kids have had enough: