Summer "Staycation"

Well, as much as I love seeing a Wisk Detergent bottle on the screen every time I go to our blog, I think it's time for an update. And I need to hone in on my blogging skills too. I've never posted anything on the blog without Kalli's supervision, so I guess I will give it a shot and Kalli can edit my choice of words and phrases later. Recently we went on a summer "staycation" as many of you know and heard all about. We took a couple of days off work and traveled around the scenic Salt Lake area to see if we could have fun without selling the farm (is that a real phrase?). We took pictures of all the stuff we did, so here they are with a little commentary so each of you can come along on our adventure!!

On thursday night we went to Lagoon. What a happy couple. (Kalli's trying to not think about the Rocket here)

Our first ride was the sky ride. That's how you know we're getting old! Actually, I just remembered we rode the scrambler first. I love that ride! Good, we're not that old yet, I guess.

The dreaded Rocket! Kalli is so scared of this thing, it's almost comical for me. I just can't believe that it can be that scary. But she's always willing to do it with me and that's how I know she loves me. I like the re-entry so that's what we did. Kalli let out the loudest, most terrifying scream when we dropped. That was the highlight of my night! I didn't know she had the pipes.

We ended the night with the Title Wave (love it!) and the Swings. This is Kalli in front of me on the swings. I held the camera up and tried to steady it and that quick I was starting to get sick so I snapped a quick pic and hurried and looked up while breathing deeply in and out (I'm getting pretty good at that now). I think the picture turned out pretty sweet though.

On Friday morning we took a visit to the zoo. We stayed there for a quite a few hours. I didn't think I would be that interested, but it was actually really cool. We first saw the monkeys. I think this was one of my favorite things at the zoo. These pictures are the spider monkeys. They were climbing all over and swinging and using their tail to swing themselves around. We stayed there and watched them forever. I just kept thinking, "these thinks look just like humans!".

Here I am giving the polar bear some skin. You might think this would be dangerous, but he's actually a pretty nice guy! (after this I said "give me a platform...let's rock, let's rock today)

You gotta love the rhinos.

I kept waiting for one of these to say, "Alex, I'm thinking of a song..."(Madagascar)

I will admit, this thing is just so cute! I guess it was a red panda. I just thought it was a cartoon fox.

This thing was awesome. I didn't know they had a cheetah at the zoo! While we were watching it laying down in the shade, it suddenly got up and was staring something down. Maybe he saw a gazelle in the next cage over. I wanted to see it run 70mph, but it probably wasn't possible in his 100 ft. cage.

We saw this cute little Asian girl and had to get a picture.

We are getting better at taking pictures of ourselves. This one has a sloth in the background!

Kalli loved the butterflies. They had at least 100 different ones on this board and I think Kalli took a picture of each one individually:)

That's classic!!

After the zoo we went to the Lion House Pantry in the bottom floor of the Lion House in downtown Salt Lake City. We bought a "salt lake connect pass" online that gave us free admission to all these places (minus lagoon) so that's why we went to them all. Our pass included free lunch at this place. It was some delicious eatin'.

Next stop, Clark Planetarium. I don't know why the only two pictures we got at this place were with ginormous glasses, but I like them. The first ones were in the toy shop area. All I can say is "Hot!". The next ones were 3D glasses for the Imax movie. They're pretty stylin also.

We bought some sweet toys at the planetarium and had to rush to the nearest park and try out our airplane. Kalli put it together in the car because it was getting dark. You pull it back by the elastic and let 'er rip. It flew a couple hundred feet. Before dark we had that thing in pieces. Mission accomplished!

flight demo

Saturday morning we high-tailed it out of the 90 degree valley and headed up to Snowbird for cool morning/afternoon of fresh air. We had a free tram ride or chairlift up to the top of the mountain and took the chairlift where we got this picture of the tram next to us. After getting off the lift at the bottom, we rode down the alpine slides which was pretty fun. I just don't know if it was worth the hour wait in line (we got fried!).

It was pretty weird walking onto the lift and being without skis or snow gear. The weirdest part was coming down the lift. It felt like we were a mile up in the air.


We found some snow in July! I'm just crouching down to touch it, nothing else.

Ok, I lied. I just couldn't resist! Nice shot Kalli.

At the top of the lift, we went through the tunnel to get to the other side of the mountain. It was pretty sweet! It must have been like 40 degrees in there; totally weird. This was a pretty wide spot that we found. I remember going through in winter on skis, they had a little snack shop in that little hole.

Here we are at the other end. It looks like it's still under construction, but they just had the conveyor belt marked off with cones.

I just like this one because I look hard core!


Well that was our summer trip. We were actually going to go to Thanksgiving point to see the dinosaur museum and walk around the gardens, but after doing all this stuff and walking around for three days, we were just like "how about we just watch a movie instead". You gotta have some lazy time on vacation too!