At 4:30! in the morning! they all had to wake up and go out to the bike race. They were done early in the afternoon and got to spend the rest of the weekend exploring.
Lincoln and I stayed home on Friday night so that we could go to a baby shower on Saturday afternoon. We got to Moab on Saturday evening. We got to splash in a cold pool, play in a hot tub, go for ice cream with the Dotys and we all shared one little hotel room. We had to move the table into the tiny, tiny kitchen space in order to set up Lincoln's port-a-crib and Emma and Aspen slept in sleeping bags on the floor.
On our way out of town on Sunday, we went into Arches National Park for a hike. Lincoln is so cute! He wore his hat most of the time, his sunglasses for a while and every time he kicked off a shoe, he would start saying "shoe! shoe!", so we never lost one of those. A lady, who sounded like she was from Australia, even asked if she could take a picture of my "cute little mate".
I started out hiking with the Dotys and left James and Linc to catch up. James is a much faster hiker than I am, so I had no doubt that he'd catch up quickly. When we reached the first arch (about a mile hike) and they still hadn't caught up, I decided to go back and look for them. They were about a half mile into the "hike". Lincoln had flat-out-refused to go in the backpack and James had carried him most of the way that far in his arms. Lincoln was happily throwing dirt out onto the trail and James was not so happy.
We gave up on hiking and turned it into play time. Lincoln had fun in all the sand.
He climbed through these rocks a dozen or more times. I'd gone as far as Landscape Arch before I turned around to find my guys. James went a little farther than Landscape Arch when he went on a solo hike, but turned around again because we had a long way to go to get home.
Lincoln had a juice break on this awesome dead tree. And eventually we made it back to the car. Linc was not happy to get back into the car for another long road trip - even if we were going home.
For awhile, I gave Linc my phone to play with. He just touches icons at random, but I ended up with this self-portrait!
We drove through a small town called Wellington - there was a fabulous playground right next to the highway. So we stopped for an hour to let Lincoln play. He laughed as soon as he saw the playground and even started walking across the grass toward it without us. He tried out everything, the slides, the climbing wall, the swings, all the ladders and tunnels. We had the entire playground to ourselves. Most of the features were for "big kids", so Linc had a lot of attention from us as he explored. We still had a scare on a big, big slide.
Lincoln climbed the steps by himself to get to the top (I followed him up for fall-prevention) and James waited to catch him at the bottom. At the top, Linc got nervous. It was the biggest slide he's ever seen. One of the big long straight metal ones. I helped him sit down at the top and we tried to talk him into going down on his own. Finally, James walked up until he was right next to the slide, maybe at the top third. I pushed Lincoln to get him started and Linc spread his legs wide - so that he could use his shoes to slow himself down. One of his rubber shoes caught against the metal side and Linc turned in the slide and BEGAN FALL OVER THE EDGE - the same side that James was on, so James just snatched him out of the air and we went on to another part of the playground. Thank goodness for hero Daddys - Linc was a long, long way off the ground. No harm done, but I won't be pushing Linc down a slide again.
Even after an hour, Lincoln was not done and he was not happy to go back into the car. We'll probably be stopping at a lot of playgrounds on roadtrips in the future. I hope. It was a fun weekend.
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