Getting There

It's time to start posting our Utah Trip 2012.

I will start with our insane travel plans. I give you these details not only to remind myself what it was like, but also, if you can learn from us, you're welcome.

To save money, we decided to fly to Vegas on a red eye flight via Spirit airlines, rent a car, buy car seats at the local Walmart (we have since learned that you can take your boosters right up to the plane where they pack them for free), drive to St. George (hour and a half away) to stay at Jake's Grandpa McCune's winter trailer home, and then drive up to Salt Lake the next day to hang out with Jake's siblings and family. 

I'll tell you what's wrong with this. Family vacations wear us out. We don't get enough sleep because we only get to see some of our loved ones once a year, and we take full advantage of the time that we can. Well, starting out a vacation already disgustingly tired isn't a good idea. It's one thing if you are flying to a different continent, but it's another when the flight takes two and a half hours. Honestly, the kids did as fabulously as they could have under the circumstances. I stressed and stressed about our travel plans but decided to suck it up and make it happen because we needed to save moolah on this one. We tried it. We know now that we'd rather save for a couple more months so that we can spend those two days we travelled with the loved ones we came to see and feel physically better while doing it!

We did get an upgrade on our rental, which was nice. We headed over to Walmart to buy boosters since it was cheaper to do that than rent them --go figure. (And when we saw families getting their boosters back at the gate without having to pay extra, we decided we'd be taking the new ones home with us.) 

Then, the drive to St. George. Oh. My. I have never been so tired in all my life. Jake told me I couldn't fall asleep or he would too. There is only Mesquite to light up the night between Las Vegas and St. George, so it's black nothingness and canyons. Jake was chewing multiple Altoids at once in an effort to stay awake. They couldn't be "curiously strong" enough that night. I would fall asleep for a split second and dream, then pop back up and start talking about what I saw since I couldn't think of a single other thing to talk to Jake about to keep him awake. Since my speech was slurring, Jake told me that my speaking voice was making him even more tired. Good grief, it was awful. Fiiiiiinally we pulled into St. George and Jake found the key to the trailer. Arrangements had already been made for us to be there, for which we were so thankful. We plopped in bed since we'd worn our pj's on the flight  somewhere around what would have been 5am our time and zonked.

Jake and I switched off getting another hour of sleep in the later morning after the kids were up, but we really had to take off and couldn't waste the whole day sleeping. 

Here are Cole, Jake and Tessa at Grandpa's trailer in St. George:

Cole was such a trooper in the first couple days that I pulled out the camera. After that, it turned into Bribery Nation to get him to sit and smile for a picture.