Utah Road Trip
Here’s a picture with mostly the same things I’ll be eating this year from Thanksgiving 2020. Somehow I didn’t take a single of any food on Thanksgiving last year?! Yikes! This year I’ll be having that same TJ’s roast, a hopefully less salty recipe of homemade stuffing (it was rough that year), and a vegan version of this same easy mashed potatoes recipe.
We decided to take a road trip to Utah this summer that originally started with a family stay in a house in Arizona. When the house part of the trip got cancelled, we decided to cut Colorado out of the trip as well as the other two parks of the big 5 in Utah.
Neither of us had ever seen any sort of desert landscape, arches, or anything else that Utah has to offer! We went to Arches National park, Capitol Reef National Park, and Canyonlands National Park. We didn’t realize we were going in monsoon season so everywhere we went we ran into thunder and lighting, rain, trail closures, and 30mph wind gusts. Long story short we ended up staying in hotels more than we had planned because of the weather, and ended up shortening our trip and coming home a few days early. We mastered the tasks of putting up and taking down the tent other than during the wind gusts, after so much practice. The pro of more hotel stays was that our kids enjoyed playing in the pools at the hotel!
The biggest bummer of the trip other than the weather was the lack of hammock-ability. We bring our Eno hammocks on every camping trip and the kids love playing in them, but none of the different camping spots that we were in had hammock trees. Super disappointing and they definitely missed the activity, which we really missed when it meant lots more parent entertaining time! We had one day where they literally kept themselves busy for multiple hours by playing in the dust and throwing it at each other, and we didn’t realize it until later, yikes!
Before this trip we had never camped for more than 2 night total so we knew we had to get some gear to help us out. The number one was these car trash bags, one in the front for us and one in the back for the kids. The other was the camp kitchen table. We had seen a couple with a rooftop tent and two of these tables last summer and knew it would be a necessity for this summer. It was amazing to have another flat space and zippered storage spots with lots of space. It meant way less digging around in our black Costco bins which was so helpful.
