Book and camping

Andrew and Edward have been praying for the last year that "Daddy will finish his book so we can go camping." Last Saturday, Kirk finished the latest book revision (and hopefully the last); so Monday we went camping. We took a short trip to Southern Utah and visited the following locations.

Fremont Indian State Park
We stopped by Fremont Indian State Park, which is a few miles from the point where I-70 meets I-15 (see more here). The park includes a nifty museum built to house some of many artifacts collected from a large Indian village that was discovered during the construction of Interstate 70. The village no longer is there--instead you have Interstate 70.
But, you can see lots of rock art left by various Indian groups, including some (that we didn't get to see personally) that depict one man's trip back to Chicago. There are a few places where you can stop your car and see the rock art or take a short walk and see some of the artifacts.
From there we traveled south on highway 89 to Kodachrome Basin State Park.

Kodachrome Basin State Park
We camped at Kodachrome Basin State Park and found it to be one of the nicest places we have been so far, with very clean bathrooms and showers. The sand/dirt was even nicely raked clean for us. We had a great site for us (#19) since it was across the road from the bathrooms. With little kids, we think a lot about bathrooms and spend quite a bit of time in them. The state park (more information here) has some neat rock formations--tall chimneys sticking out of the ground. You can see one behind our campsite in the photo with Lucy.

The boys started running as soon as they got there and didn't stop until they went to sleep.
Lucy was quite cheery even for being strapped in her stroller or chair most of the time. It rained, but we got the tent up before the storm really hit. I did feed the children dinner in the car and Kirk and I shivered outside in the wind and rain since we forgot our coats. After dinner, the storm passed so we went on a short hike to see Shakespeare Arch.
We took the trail at a fast clip, so we covered the 0.5 mile in about 10 minutes. We decided to continue on the loop trail to see some more. Soon we realized we were walking on an almost-washed out path on the edge of a cliff. It was pretty spooky, especially with small children.
The rock formation in the back is the Sentinel--it looks over the whole valley (Grand Staircase of the Escalante). Edward is on the "trail" and if you look carefully you can see the trail across the edge of the cliff. It goes between the Sentinel and the higher cliffs. With a few prayers we got safely back to the car.

Bryce Canyon National Park
The next day we visited Bryce Canyon (see more here), which isn't really a canyon. Kirk said that you would have to be a really bad photographer not to get at least a few good photos. It was quite beautiful, even with the scattered rainstorms. There weren't very many people, either.
We started at Sunset Point and walked to Sunrise Point. Then we walked below the rim on a short hike (Queen Victoria rock formation). In the photos you can see that Edward started wearing his leash since I was having fits with the combination of little boys and huge cliffs and few railings.
We drove out to the end of the park (Rainbow Point) at 9100 feet. We took turns dashing out of the car to look at the scenery. It was very cold and windy. You can see the storms on the Kiabab in the photo.
We stopped at many of the lookout points on the way back, including Inspiration Point, which really did have the best view of Bryce Amphitheater.
We had a fun family vacation. As soon as we got home later that night, Edward and Andrew were ready to go camping again.