President's Day Weekend

This President's Day weekend was really fun! Let's start with Friday:

I went swimming and had a really hard swim, but I loved it! 

Pete and I went climbing at the gym. It was the most awesome Valentine's Day date ever!

Saturday morning I woke up with a slightly sore achillies, but I didn't want to cancel on my friend for my long run so I took some Ibprofen, soaked my foot in some warm water for 20 minutes, then put an leg warmer on to keep it warm. I don't know if any or all of those things were what did it, but my ankle felt better and I was able to run 6 miles without any problems! It wasn't even sore later!

Saturday night, Pete and I met some friends at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in Ogden. This is our third year going to this, and we always love it. It's basically a bunch of short films about outdoor adventure sports. Some of the ones we watched were about: amazing mountain biking, a blind guy doing white water kayaking, some guys doing some amazing skiing, the last ice miner in Equador, a cute British girl climbing some scary stuff, a documentary about Lindsey Van (who was largely part of making women's ski jumping happen for the first time at the olympics this year) that made me cry. It was seriously an emotional, experience for me.

The last film was about a guy who did 35 climbing routes on his 35th birthday. It's called 35 and it totally made me cry. What he says about making every day of your life count is just so beautiful, I totally recommend you watch it. It's so inspiring to me. (I just watched it again and I'm sitting her practically sobbing)

When it got over, I stood up and said, "I'm so glad we're going climbing tomorrow!"

The next day was Sunday and I had to talk Pete into going through with our plan to go to St. George because he had crashed snowboarding the day before and was feeling really sore, plus our friends were going to be busy so we couldn't stay with them which turned it into much bigger of a trip money-wise. But the kids were all so excited, and I was excited, and I told him we could take the day to just relax and get a hotel with a hot tub to soak his aching muscles in. So that's what we did. We stayed at a Holliday Inn Express just off the Hurricane exit and the kids LOVED IT!

Not only were they so happy to be done with the 4 hour drive, but this was the nicest hotel they'd ever stayed in!

We got a 2 bedroom suite, and George thought the pull-out couch was so fun! (At least until we tried to get him to go to sleep on it...)

We went to the pool that was not in the sun at all so I was a little dissapointed by that, but sitting in the hot tub was nice and the kids didn't mind the cool pool. After that, we went out to dinner then got ice cream to eat in our hotel while we watched TV (What TV?!) until we got to bed way later than usual. It was a fun day and felt very much like a vacation. :)

The next day, we had breakfast at the hotel buffet which the kids also thought was the coolest thing ever, then we headed to Chuckwalla to climb.

Chuckwall was totally packed!

We kind of knew it would be since the weather was so nice AND it was a holliday. So we decided to hike about a mile down to Turtle Wall and climb there.

There is a 5.8 on that wall that was the first route I ever lead (11 years ago when Mindy was a baby! Yikes!) I decided I wanted to lead it again. We started getting our gear out and realized we forgot to bring any quck draws, but luckily a guy there let us use his so I was still abel to do it! I was suprised how scary it was! Luckily Pete and this other lady there were watching me and givng me pionters because I back clipped the first bolt so I had to fix that. I was so nervous. By the second or third bold I said, "I don't want to do this anymore!" But I finished it and everything was fine! Whew! It really felt so good to do that! I need to start leading more.

Here's Ethan taking his turn.

Mindy, waiting patiently.

George and Elle just hanging out in the desert.

Pete patiently stood there and belayed everyone.

Here's Ethan almost to the top! 

And now Mindy! They both made it and did a great job even though sandstone feels totally different to climb on than the rock in Big Cottonwood or the holds in the gym that they're more used to.

Here's George all ready to go!

He just loved swinging and we kind of taught him out to push away from the wall and bounce on his feet. SO CUTE!

After hiking back to the car, we had lunch/dinner at Pizza Factory which is kind of Pete's tradition from when he was a teenager and used to climb here all the time with his friends. No one had a problem with that. There's a fun phone booth outside so we had to go get a picture while we got the last of our wiggles out before the drive home. (Apparantly Elle's wiggles were all gone.)

So it was a quick trip to St. George, but it was totally worth it to me. The temperature was in the 70s and it was just so beautiful there! I love climbing so much, and the hike was really fun too, even though I was carrying George most of the way. I'm so glad we got to go!