Our trip started off with a bang.
After going to sleep fairly well (considering how excited he was), Alex woke up screaming in the middle of the night while we were staying in Rangely.
I mean, screaming.
I have never heard him scream like that without a visible wound. He was clawing at his ear and saying how much it hurt, writhing and crying and unwilling even to let us hold him. We were at a loss about what to do, as it was clear he would not go back to sleep and was in terrible pain. This was Saturday night, and in a small town like Rangely, there is no Urgent Care or nurse help line. The doctor’s office wouldn’t open until Monday morning. There was no other option for us at that moment. We had to take him to the hospital.
That was a hard pill to swallow, but it will be even worse when we get the bill. The things we do for our children…
It turned out he had a severe ear infection (where did that come from?) but he would be fine with some antibiotics. We had the go-ahead to go camping on Monday, since by then the inflammation would have gone down and he would be feeling much better, which he was. It was almost as if it had never happened. If it weren’t for the ringing in my ears, that is.
We loaded down the car and headed out to Moab, Utah. The kids could only go for about an hour and a half in the car before they needed a break, so it took longer than we expected, but we rolled into Moab in the late afternoon and found a campsite in the same campground where Lord Herndon and I had stayed on our trip in 2005. It was a bit more posh than we hoped for their first camping experience, but maybe that is a good way to introduce them to the whole thing. This place had a swimming pool, which was very nice and refreshing after a long day of hiking! The first day, we set up camp, had dinner, then went swimming.
The second day, we headed into Arches National Park early in the morning and hiked up to Double Arch and the South Window arch. The kids were so excited to get up into the rocks, it was all I could do to encourage their exploration while still teaching them a healthy respect for cliff ledges! They absolutely loved it.
But we weren’t through with Arches yet. The kids were in their pajamas, the sun was setting and the air was cooler, and we had an all-day pass. So we drove back in and hiked up to Landscape Arch. Evelyn was so excited to be hiking in the twilight that she ran all the way up the .75 mile trail to the arch, and we had to jog to keep up with her. It was another walk down memory lane for Mike and I, since we had hiked to this one together before.
By the time we had Landscape Arch posed just right and captured it on digital “film,” the sky was teal and bats were swooping around us. Princess thought they were butterflies and wouldn’t hear anything different. She also asked what “that sound” was, and after I told her they were crickets, she turned around to Alex and said, “Do you hear the ‘rickets?!”
It was well past their normal bedtime by this point, so I wasn’t too surprised when they started to drag their feet on the way home. Mike pulled out his green laser pointer to see how far he could shine it on the distant cliff faces, and the kids’ eyes just lit up. So he shone it on the path at their feet and they started running around, trying to catch the “green bug.” Whenever he shut it off, they searched around frantically trying to find it again.
I will give you two guesses as to how we got them to walk the .75 mile back to the car, but you’ll only need one.
They chased that “green bug” into the night, and Mike and I could barely run, laugh, and breathe all at the same time.
This was one of my favorite moments during the trip.
