A weekend off in St. George, Utah
Hunter hit the wall last week and announced that he was exhausted and needed a day off! His request was at least a day with a) no driving b) no biking and c) no hiking or walking… Geez – you’d think he wasn’t on vacation or something!
He announced this while in Zion and we weren’t willing to give up on hiking there so we negotiated for a weekend stop in St. George, Utah which is just down the road.
We rolled into the campground in St. George at lunch time on Thursday. It is a full service commercial campground at the south end of downtown St. George. It has a heated pool, hot tub, recreation room, shuffleboard and a whole lot of seniors that live here all winter! Either way, it fit the bill as a great place to pause for 4 days and regroup.
Hunter was happily into the pool Thursday afternoon and then into the trailer to play lego and watch movies. He then began busily planning the itinerary for his official “day off” on Friday…sleep in, pool, shuffleboard, skateboard park and sessions of play time and movie watching with dad in between.
The day started well with the sleep in part, and then he woke up and announced to Tim that he dreamt that he had lost his front tooth cap (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152108133720082&set=a.10150715435285082.711133.515250081&type=1&theater) that had been put on September 17th, 2012. He then pinched himself to see if he was still dreaming, put his finger in his mouth and launched out of bed to look in the mirror to discover that YES, somehow in the middle of the night, his tooth mould had come off… MOM!!!! Next step – scrap original plans and find a local dentist. The great news was we found one a few blocks away that could get us in that morning. Total cost $200 US, which is cheaper than the $350 we paid last year in Whitehorse!
New plan for the day – DENNY’s for lunch, which just happened to be down the block on our way home (impulse cravings by 2 boys…). They are both busy chatting about what they are going to order as we are just about to get there and Tim turns to me and asks “is there anything you can eat here? just wondering how much of a jerk I’m being pushing for lunch here”. I answer “Yes, I’ll find something but thanks for thinking about me” and Hunter says “you’re not a jerk, you’re my DAD!”… what do you say to that???
Next impulse change to the plan was walking by Fiesta Funworld on our way to check out the local skateboard park – how can you say no to mini golf, bumper cars and arcade games? The only disappointment was that Hunter isn’t big enough to drive the go-cart cars. Hunter had mini-golf/go-carts on his trip wish list so it was win/win.
It was a fabulously hot day so we all happily headed back to the campground and into the pool for a refreshing break before getting in the truck and heading out to Western Legacy Farm & Ranch for their Sleepy Hollow Halloween event – corn maze, pumpkin catapult, headless horseman,petting zoo, face painting, cow roping, pumpkin trains and more! It was another tick off Hunter’s wish list as he’s never been in a corn maze before. It ran from 5:30 to 8:30 and was a great family event run by a local family farm.
Saturday was another sleep-in for the boys as I got up and went for my first run in 2 months (ouch running muscles vs biking muscles!) and hit the local farmers market. I brought home yummy baked goods for breakfast which helped to get the day started and some school work done. We then wandered downtown to check out the St. George Spooky Town Fair – a partnership between the Chamber of Commerce & the Washington County School Foundation. It was a kid centric fair in the main square downtown with halloween games, halloween activities, contests and lots of food and other booths.
We started off with a trip on their historic carousel and then checked out the Haunted House before taking a wander around the entire site. We enjoyed the bouncy castle, got some giveaways at the booths and had fun at most of the games booths. The big hit of the afternoon was the Hamburger eating contest, which was sponsored by McDonalds! It started with a Big Mac eating contest between 4 highschool boys, then moved into a second Big Mac round of general public volunteers. Hunter had decided earlier that he wanted to do this but was a little put off with the Big Mac idea as he can’t get one in his mouth to take a single bite! There were enough kids in the crowd that were interested that they ran a Hamburger eating contest – how many hamburgers can you eat in one minute? Hunter came in 2nd (there was a tie between the 2 older boys for 1st) and was thrilled with his performance and the experience as a whole. We were proud of him for choosing to participate (another first!).
After a very hot and exhausting afternoon at Spookytown we wandered around to a few more stores, saw some cool sights, bought some more mountain bike gear and then headed home for another refreshing jump in the pool and some more down time in the camper/trailer.
We finished off our weekend with an adventure day on Sunday. We got up early and rode our bikes to Pioneer Park, just north of Downtown. It is a 52 acre rustic community park that is climbers/scramblers paradise. Full of sticky slick rock and well worn routes with hand and foot holds, we spent 2 hours just playing on the different rock formations. We explored on our bikes on the way home and ended up with a 17km ride round trip. This was capped off by a well earned swim in the pool.