Had a good weekend

Alene, Caiden, and my Nephew Brady (who is 1.5 years older than Caiden) all went down to stay in St. George this weekend to get into a bit warmer climate for a bit. It was a nice trip.

We got down there on Friday and kind of "settled" in. We did a lot of swimming in the pool and hanging out in the jacuzzi. I coaxed Brady into doing a belly-flop for $1.

We went out on Saturday to play some mini golf and then headed back to the hotel to watch the BYU-New Mexico game. BYU won 42-17 and with this win, it gave BYU the out-right championship to the MWC and an invite to the Las Vegas bowl, which Alene and I will be attending in December. The cool thing was that I watched the BYU game from Alene's laptop (a buddy of mine streamed it from his computer), so I had the TV free and watched the Michigan-Ohio St. game at the same time (I'll post pictures later).

After that, we did some swimming and went out to Cold Stone to celebrate Brady's BD. He turned 9. One thing I've noticed is that St. George does every portion much bigger than they do in Salt Lake. At Cold Stone, the portion of ice cream they gave was HUGE. At Cafe Rio, I felt like they piled on more meat and also didn't skimp on the beans and rice. Interesting.

Anyway, on Sunday we went to Zions National Park, which was beatuiful. In fact, it could be my favorite park in Utah. We hiked the trail that leads to the entrance to the Narrows. I want to hike up them a bit someday. Alene has already done it and says it becomes kind of boring, but she said she would do it with me when we had the chance. It's so cool to see a river coming out of them with nothing but rock wall on each side. We also hiked up to Emerald Ponds, which was really pretty as well.

We got back into town, went to swim for a bit, then headed to Chuck-A-Rama to pig out (which we did). The food there is admitedly good, but Alene and I agreed that we should only go to that place once a year :-).

On Monday we went to Snow Canyon and did a couple of hikes. We went into Jenny's Canyon, which is the only Narrows spot in snow Canyon. That was pretty cool. We then hiked out to 3 ponds, but never found the 3 ponds. The trail map listed the hike as 3.5 miles round-trip, but we had to have gone at least 2 miles and still had not found anything. We ended up just climbing on some rocks nearby, which was fun. Plus, the echoing was cool in the area. Getting out there, we hiked through a sandy river-bed for quite a bit, which was nice because the sand was really soft. We ended up at the red sand-dunes area and played around on them for a bit. I was disappointed that the dunes weren't very steep (funner to jump into), but it was still fun.

The drive home sucked (as does any long-distance drive), but I was glad to be home and take a good shower last night.

I'll post pictures later.