Gale Force Winds. . . or lack thereof

10, 11, 12 March 2012

We spent the weekend in Hurricane, Utah with the hubby's father and step-mother, Papa Glen and Nana Lori. It was so much fun. We left Friday evening after the hubby came home from work. During the drive, after the kids fell asleep the hubby and I had a great discussion about physics. We talked about the Age of Newton and the Age of Einstein and how each came to be and how we came to grow in our understanding. I say discussion, to be more truthful, it was a lecture. Though I enjoyed it thoroughly and took many notes. Did you know that the speed of light is 187 miles per second, which gives it an hourly rate of roughly 673,200 miles per hour. I knew it was fast, but knowing how fast is kinda neat. In my Ah-Ha blog I will write a more detailed post about our discussion, a.k.a. the notes I took on my husband's lecture. I am so blessed to have such a brilliant man for a husband. He knows so much and is so passionate about what he knows. His great loves are Science and History. Neither of which I cared much for in my conveyor-belt education, but he makes it all come alive. He is my mentor in these areas of academia.

Saturday morning we had some fun hanging out around Papa and Nana's house before we went for an adventure to the Dinosaur Discovery at Johnson Farm. It was so neat to see just how many tracks and fossils there were and to learn so much about the age of the area. Almost everyone (in Utah at least) knows about Lake Bonneville, but these dinosaur tracks are from a time long before that even! They are fossils from the lake bed of Dixie Lake which was in the Early Jurassic Age (approx. 195 to 198 million years ago). Lake Bonneville was only 32 thousand years ago.

Saturday evening we had a birthday party for Ca with Papa and Nana and had a treasure hunt for his present then some ice cream cake. The weather was so gorgeous down there. Sometimes I wish we would have bought a house a little closer to the equator than we did! Ah well. Papa Glen taught the hubby and I how to play cribbage. It was a very fun game and I can't wait to teach it to Ra. The math facts you hone while playing it are incredible. I think Ra will have a lot of fun. I might simplify the rules for her a little bit and first, but in time all the rules make for some intriguing math fun!

Sunday we spent some time at the Hurricane Valley Heritage Park and Museum, though the museum was closed, the park was fun. I learned about how Hurricane got it's name, though I could have guessed! It is always windy there, though it was not windy this weekend. Probably the first time I have ever been to Hurricane where it was not extremely windy the entire time. After the park we went back to the house for some lunch then Papa Glen offered to show us a neat dirt road trail that goes up through the neat red rock mountains that not many people know about. It was fun, and terrifying as I am afraid of heights. We stopped at one point and I let the Hubby take the kids, one at a time, out to look. I was so terrified it took some time for me to get out of the car let alone come withing twenty feet of anything that looked remotely like a drop off. The trail lead all the way to St. George where we turned around and went back to the house.

At the house we played with the kids, bubbles and catch and whatnot. By 5 o'clock in the evening we left Papa and Nana's and went and had dinner at Red Lobster. We had never been there before and thought it might be fun for the kids to try some new foods. It was expensive but worth it. Next time we probably wont bring the kids, at least not all of them. They went in telling me that they didn't like shrimp and crab and lobster but I told them that since they had never tried them before they could not say they didn't like them. We ordered a little bit of each and the kids just loved it; they kept asking for more!

The hubby's next job was located in Mesquite, Nevada and the whole crew stopped in St. George for the night so we stayed with the hubby in his hotel room for the evening. He had to leave with the rest of the company at 5:30am but the kids and I were up at 7:00am and had some continental breakfast and then left for home at 8:30am.

On our way home we stopped by my sister's house for a few hours to let the kids play before finishing the last hour leg of the five hour car ride. What a fun and exhausting trip. I think I need a few days of straight sleep to recover!