Road Trip

This past weekend we took our first two-child road trip down to the gorgeous Capitol Reef National Park, 3.5 hours south of Salt Lake. We realized that this would be a different type of getaway weekend for us -- no long, swift-paced hikes, no nice, leisurely dinners, no good night's sleep -- so, we're not totally naive. However, we didn't realize that Luke would officially become a Terrible Two-Year-Old (a few weeks early) during this particular trip. Friday and Saturday were filled with very loud and dramatic public tantrums, the really frustrating kind that made us decide emphatically that this would be our last family getaway for a while. I won't go on and on about how he tortured us, but here's one anecdote: it took three tries (one on each day we were there) to do a very short hike. The first two times we only made it about 100 yards before the kicking, screaming, and throwing-oneself-on-the-ground became so unbearable that it wasn't worth pressing on. But Keith was determined to do the hike, so on Sunday we finally coerced Luke to do the whole thing with us (half of it in the pack on Keith's back) and, as we suspected, he really enjoyed climbing on the rocks, collecting sticks and stones, and running on the trail. The only glitch was when he scampered off-trail and stepped on a cactus. We had to pluck a handful of thorns from his ankle but he actually handled it really well. It was the one time all weekend that I would have expected him to cry and carry on, but ironically, it was the one time he didn't at all! At the top of the hike, Luke was requesting to get out of the pack ("Out! Out! Out!"), and a guy on the trail said "he's a little cranky, huh?" We were like, "umm, no - this is stellar behavior."

Here's Luke crying and protesting outside the car as we started up the trail, hoping that he'd follow. I ended up carrying him and Anna (since he'd only go with Mommy) up part way until he forgot about his misery:
Here's me carrying both kids; you might notice Luke's pained expression:
Again, me carrying both kids and one segment of Luke's scream fest:

The view from our room was lovely:
The lodge had horses and buffalo... watching them was probably Luke's favorite part of the whole weekend:
Eventually he got into climbing on the rocks. He went up and over this one at least ten times. Naturally, we had to drag him--kicking and screaming, surprise!--back to the car: