vacation - day 7 (home at last)

We slept in, ate breakfast, then headed out to the pool for a swim., The plan was to swim for an hour or so to wear the kids out, then hopefully they'd sleep a little more while we drove the rest of the way home. We got out to the pool, only to find that Murphy had gotten there before us and posted a POOL CLOSED sign! Unbelievable! The nerve of that guy! We swam anyway. (what a rebel I've turned into, eh?) The water was ICY cold, so the kids went between the pool and the hot tub. We let them play until the security guy came and told us that we couldn't swim. When asked why, the answer was that the hotel hadn't been able to hire a lifeguard, so the pool was closed until the found one - for liability reasons. HELLO!!! have they never been to any other motel. NONE of them have lifeguards. Instead they have signs posted that say "no lifeguard on duty. swim at own risk!" I was a little put out.

The "closed pool"

We got everyone out and ready to go. Tim had mentioned a couple days before this that "everything that can go wrong on this vacation has gone wrong." we both noted that the exception to this was that the van hadn't broken down. This was very much on my mind as we filled the gas tank before leaving town. A man walked up to me and said, "My car ran out of gas and I need to get to San Bernadino (or some other San something or other city in Cali.) Can you help me out?" While my knee jerk reaction was to say no, my next thought was, "if I don't give this guy money, my van is going to break down on the way home." I gave him some money, wished him good luck with a smile, and when I got back in the van I said a little prayer that went something like, "I just helped that guy out; please, please let us get home safely and without any more trouble."

Everything went great on the way home. The kids traveled better than ever - without watching even one movie! We drove straight through until we got to Cedar City, then stopped at a great park there - "Park Discovery." We ate dinner there and let the kids play for about and hour and a half. They loved it. Then we loaded back up, and drove the rest of the way home. We got in at about 8:00 pm - tired and so glad to be home.

We had a fun family scavenger hunt. The park had this sign hung up, and each of the bugs were posted individually throughout the park. We divided up into two team and each team had to locate all the bugs on their 1/2 of the sign. Tim and Bryan won, but only because we never did locate the "luna moth head" I think it must have fallen off, since even after they won, Tim tried to find it too and we never did find it. Oh well, it was lots of fun looking.

These last couple pictures were take during the last 30 minutes. WE ARE ALMOST HOME!!!

(yes, he is really asleep, not just pretending)