Hey, baby, let's go to Vegas!

Well, I took my SAD self to some sunshine last weekend! We decided to take a road trip to warm, sunny weather and it was wonderful. We went to St. George on Friday and stayed over at my sweet Gramma & Grampa J's house. Saturday morning we saw a really neat wildlife museum in St. George. A hunter who's been all over the world on some very wild and expensive expeditions had full-body mounts of all of the animals he's taken over the years. The museum is full of all the animals in lifelike poses; when you walk through the museum you listen on a handheld "telephone-radio-thingy" to facts about the animals and the areas they are from. The most interesting part is to listen to the hunter himself tell stories about particular hunting trips. Tess and Miles got a kick out of holding the phones up to their ears. We also saw a live bat flying around in the museum and thought that was pretty fun too. I didn't get a picture of the strangest animal there, but I downloaded a few from the internet: This is a Saiga Antelope, from Mongolia. It has a huge crazy nose and they said that it is important because the cold air that it breathes is warmed in the nasal cavity before reaching its lungs. It also said that it can run even faster than a cheetah! (But I'm not sure if I believe it because nothing I read on the internet about it mentioned that...who knows? All I know is that it could easily outrun me.) Here's Tess with her great-grampa, listening to the phone.

Then we went on to Las Vegas. It was beautiful warm weather and we all loved walking around in the heat with no coats or jackets. We walked up and down the strip in the afternoon. It was pretty jam-packed on a Holiday Weekend Saturday...but we still had a lot of fun. We all really liked the fountains at the Bellagio and Caesar's Palace.

We also went to the Bass Pro Shop/Silverton and saw a big aquarium they have there. The kids loved seeing the tropical fish and searching for Nemo and Dori. I love this picture of Miles--we didn't even notice Miles' reflection when we took the picture, but when we uploaded it we saw his sweet face reflected in the glass. What a cutie!

On Monday we drove down to Hoover Dam and took a tour there. It really is amazing. They are building a huge new highway-bridge and it was awesome to watch them lower some of the giant concrete pieces into place. In this picture Tess was not being very cooperative ("Chuckles Tess," as we call her--it's a term we borrowed from Bryan's sister that describes a child who is so far from being happy that it's funny to watch how ornery they are.)

This is at gma's house on our last night: Poor Tess was pretty pooped out by this point.

All in all it was a really great trip. The kids did very well with the long car rides and we just had a fun, relaxing, WARM time!