A Day in the Life...: Zion family camping trip 2010

Zion was absolutely amazing. Especially after the 7 hr drive that on which we discovered that Katie gets motion sick...yeah not fun. We arrived to the park and were welcomed by a temperature of 104 degrees. Our first stop? The river, which is where the rest of the family was. While we were down at the river, I was walking around on the side and ended up falling down flat on my butt. I got my clothes soaking wet without the help of Justin or Gary...that doesn't usually happen. Anyway, I was dry in like 30 mins so it didn't matter that much. We went and set up our tents and the helped Aunt Julie make dinner. After dinner, my parents left to go put Katie to bed at their hotel (yes we camped and they stayed in a hotel haha), the rest of us (Uncle Jeff, Aunt Julie, Justin, Betsy and I) decided to take the shuttle (you aren't actually allowed to drive through Zion) up to the lodge for some ice cream. It was 9:00pm but it was unbelievable how light out it was. The views were awesome driving up the canyon. I wish I had, had my camera. We got up the lodge and looked around for a bit, but the ice cream place was closed so we got on the next shuttle back down. By the time we got back on the shuttle the sun had gone down, meaning we got to drive through the canyon by moonlight...so cool! It was still a million degrees outside so we had the windows down on the bus. As we were driving and I was enjoying the scenery, Justin hits me on the arm, points to a light behind one of the mountains and enthusiastically says "It's a UFO! What's that thing we are near? Area 59?"
"You mean Area 51," I replied.
"Oh yeah that's it. You saw it thought didn't you?"
"Yes, I saw it. It was probably just a..."
"That was no helicopter. It was a UFO! Totally unidentifiable"
We then spent the next five mins debating whether "unidentifiable" is even a word (it is...we felt stupid).
Another couple of minutes pass by as the French people behind us jabbered away in their native tongue. And then I'm hit on the arm again, "What?" i said.
"Look at this!"
I leaned over towards the window and tried to look up where Justin was looking, but couldn't see anything. I told him this and he makes me "trade seats with him", which consisted of me moving over to his seat and then him sitting on top of me. I looked up to where he was frantically gesturing and saw not a bird, but a plane. "I'm being squished to look at an airplane in the sky?" I thought. But excuse me, this was no ordinary plane. It's little blinking lights indicated that it was not a commercial plane, according to my oh so aviation savvy cousin. At least the French people had a good laugh at us and a story to tell about crazy Americans. Such a fun bus ride haha.
Betsy, Justin, Aunt Julie and I played cards the rest of the evening and then headed off to bed although it was still way too hot to be comfortable enough to fall asleep. We finally drifted off to sleep only to be awakened by the hard winds blowing in the sides of our tents. The winds had stopped by the time the sun came up and I heard a car pull up and then my cousin, Jamie's voice (she had driven down early that morning and just gotten there) telling my Aunt and Uncle to have a nice hike. About an hour and a half later the zipper on our tent opening woke me up again and I was surprised to see Justin poke his head in and asked me if I wanted to get up since he couldn't sleep. I crawled out of the tent, leaving Betsy asleep and walked over to the table to join Justin for a pancake breakfast. A little while later Uncle Jeff and Aunt Julie returned and then Jamie and Betsy got up. We hung around camp for a while, playing frisbee and relaxing, then my parents came to meet up with us and we all headed to the tubing place to rent inter tubes so we could "blissfully float down the river" or so the sign said. Apparently they didn't factor in families like mine when they wrote their description. The float was only 2 miles, but it took about 2 hours because the water was so low. We also made a couple of stops along the way though. Swimming, trying to link all seven of our tubes together, Gary and Justin fulfilling their need to tip me over. They picked up my entire tube and flipped me over backwards. When I resurfaced, I grabbed hold of Justin's foot as he tried to paddle away and flipped him over as well. I then went for Gary, but couldn't lift the tube up...that was good enough payback for me haha. A ways down the river, we encountered some rapids and of course that was the time my uncle chose to get stuck. I crashed into him and then while I was trying to steer myself out from between the rocks, my tube got carried away right out from under me and I got swept along under the rapids, banging against the rocks...so fun...I got a great bruise on my hip.
Side note: you remember when you were a little kid and you would always have some scrape, bruise or cut? And then it seems as you get older you injure yourself a lot less. Well, I think I'm regressing. I mean, I had a good 5-6years there where I didn't get many injuries, but it seems like since I started college I always have some sort of scrape or bruise like back in the good ol' days. Hmmm...just a thought.
Anyway, at another point along the river we found out that it was pretty deep and saw that there was a rope tied to the tree on the bank. Of course we had to stop there and all try the rope. So great!

Here are some pictures from swimming in a swimming hole we found the next day. Narration to come.