Arches 2016

At the beginning of April we spent a few days with some of my family camping at Arches. My brother reserved one of the two group camp sites a year ago. My sister Melissa was there with most of her family (minus the two oldest kids), Ben was there with his family, and then several of Ben's inlaws were there as well. We had lots of room in our campsite and it was a beautiful place to be. There were a lot of rocks in our campsite to climb on, more sand than you could want, and it was so nice to be actually in the park. 

These next two pictures are of our campsite. Both photos were taken from on top of the same rock, looking different directions. Our tent was the blue one and the whole area was our site. It was lots of fun for the kids to have a large area to roam around in.

Anders and Summer in our tent. 

Summer and Spencer playing in the sand.

Most of our group.

The hike to Delicate Arch is one that I don't think we will ever forget. We started out a little behind most everyone else (thats what happens when you have the two youngest people in the large group and others in the group want to get going immediately). Within the first 5 minutes, Ellen was crying and Summer was already complaining. I almost turned us around a couple of times, but we kept going.  Ellen settled down pretty quickly, but Summer did not.  She cried and complained most of the way up, but she did make it. Summer's motivation was to catch up to Lyla and Katie (her cousins). We hiked with Ben & Spencer for a while, which helped. At one point in the hike you climb up a large rock face. When we got to the top of that, I had her turn around and look how far we had come. After that, she did a lot better on the hike. Anders did carry her for a short distance a few times. We made it to the arch and she seemed to recover. She did great on the way down and was quite happy to be hiking down with Lyla. They were pretty cute. Now if she starts complaining about walking somewhere, I remind her that she hiked all the way to Delicate Arch, so she can keep walking where we are. It seems to motivate her pretty well.

Snack break on the way to Delicate Arch.

These three little ones found the one spot of shade on the large rock face climbing to Delicate Arch.

Hiking back down with Lyla.

After Delicate Arch, we took a quite trip to Balance Rock. Anders stayed in the car with Ellen while Summer and I went to explore with everyone else. Summer quite liked Balance Rock. She kept asking to see it again.

Balance Rock

Summer and her Cousins

That afternoon the wind picked up like crazy. The winds were 30 mph+ and when your campsite is all sand and you're living in tents, that is really strong. We were the first ones back to camp (we were the only ones with napping kids), so when we got there, it was crazy. We made a quick lunch, ate it in our tent, and tried to put the girls to sleep. Summer quickly fell asleep, but Ellen was scared because the tent was moving so much in the wind. Finally, Anders took her for a drive and I stayed with Summer. The wind got so bad that it woke up Summer (miraculously it didn't happen earlier) and we collapsed the tent so it wouldn't blow away (it kept coming unstaked), and then we headed to Moab for the rest of the afternoon. We stopped at the visitors center and ran into Melissa and Jared there, where we hung out for a while and then went to dinner at Pizza Hut. Cooking in more wind sounded miserable. After that, we stopped at the rock shop to look around and then headed back to camp. By the time we made it back (7ish), the wind had died down and it was quite pleasant.

Summer, Lyla, Katie, and Tyler at the visitors center.

On our "adventure" hike that Ben took all the kids on.

This was our hike to Landscape arch. Summer didn't quite make it this far. She complained most of the way on this one as well. We did this on our way out of the park to head home. I thought it was way cool to see though. Pretty amazing!

It takes a lot of stuff to camp, especially when camping with a toddler. Our car was full, but we were excited as we started out.

The little lizard in our campsite.

Ellen loved the camping, except when sleeping. She liked the little camp chair, the sand, the great outdoors, and all the people to pay attention to her.  She did spend most of the first night in bed with me and then the second night she screamed for quite a while and then suddenly fell asleep on my bed. I was able to move her to her bed and she slept all night, even though it was freezing that night. I wished she had been in bed with me that night since I was so cold.

Ellen was our helper!

This was taken in our campsite. 

Overall, we had a great time, but were all exhausted when we got home. There was sand everywhere. I had to wash every blanket, pillow, sleeping bag, and piece of clothing that went with us. I had piles of sand on our floor and am still finding it on occasion. I had to sweep and mop our kitchen floor a couple of times because it was so gritty. I also washed a pair of socks, soaked them for a few days, washed them again, dried them, and when I wore them, I had a pile of sand in my shoes within an hour. Regardless, it was fun and we made some great memories. My brother is moving in a few weeks, so it was nice to get to spend some time with them. Summer and Ellen both loved it (except for the hiking part for Summer) and we quite enjoyed it.