Bring on the fun!

Last Thursday night was Sam's last night shift for work.  For those of you who don't know, Sam was working 80 hour work weeks.  He'd leave for work around 3pm and get home about 4:30am, then go to sleep until 1:00pm and do it all again.  This was a normal ruitine for him 6 days a week for the past 6-8 weeks.  Needless to say, we were ready for him to get a break.  So once he got caught up on sleep, we got busy on some fun.  Starting with Saturday, we went to Swiss Days in Midway, UT.  It's a fun festival that celebrates Midway's Swiss heritage.  We met Chris & Gina in the morning and got a place for the parade.  The boys loved all the candy from the parade, but they weren't so excited about the loud motorcycles.  After the parade we got some lunch and went home.  It was a fun day.

    On Monday, Labor Day, we had a BBQ.  It was a lot of fun to have our Northern Knecht Clan and the Will & Amber Mickelson Family with us.  It was great weather and a lot of fun.  The kids loved playing on the swing set.

Tuesday morning we packed up the boys and drove to Moab, UT to go camping.  We were really looking forward to this camping trip because it's the first time that we've gone on a real family vacation (driving to CA for holidays doesn't count).  We got down to Moab and set up our camp site and immediately it started raining.  None the less we still had a great time.

Ben, Sam, & Tom trying to stay dry.

Ben checking out our tent.  You can see all the water drops on the tent.

The rainbow we saw at our campsite between showers.

After a good night's sleep we got up and went to Arches National Park.  Because it had rained the night before and that morning, the weather was overcast and cool.  It was perfect for our desert excursion.

Ben sometimes likes to lay down in random places.

Fiery Furnace

Delicate Arch

After we finished our tour of Arches we took a drive over to Dead Horse Point ("Utah's Grand Canyon").  The boys had a little nap on the drive over.

Dead Horse Point was amazing.  I've never seen anything like this.  You know how I feel about heights, I was terrified the whole time, yet I managed to get close enough to the edge to take a few pics.

That's the Colorado River down there.

The boys enjoyed climbing on the rocks near the picnic area.

After all of our site seeing we went back to our campsite had dinner and ice cream.

Then we got ready for bed.

We had such a great time, even with all the weather we experienced.  We'll definitely make camping a family tradition.