Junior Rangers

Yay! The last of the boys' Jr. Ranger badges finally came in the mail today! Cedar Breaks National Monument had run out of them and promised to mail theirs when more came in.  

Not long after they started collecting their badges, my mom made a banner for each one to display their hard-earned rewards. By last count, they have badges and/or patches from 57 different national park units + 2 California state parks. Oh yeah, and a sticker from Muir Woods. Woo. Hoo. Great job, boys!

Hmmm, looks like they're running out of real estate. We'll either have to stop visiting national parks or sweet-talk PoPo into making more banners...

Summing It All Up

Now that we've been home for two weeks, I thought I'd poll the family for their reviews of our vacation...

What was your favorite national park/monument/historic site?

M: Yellowstone National Park, because of all of the wildlife

R: Arches National Park, for the rock formations and hiking

J: It's too hard to pick!

Me: Yellowstone National Park, awesome thermal features and wildlife

Lost!

Looking back over my previous posts, I realized that I never told the story of getting lost in Yellowstone when I was little...

My family was checking out of Old Faithful Inn that morning, so my dad and my brother were taking some stuff out to the car to load up. I decided to follow them out, but was far enough behind that I didn't see which exit they took. I went out to the parking lot to look for them, but couldn't find them, so I went back up to our room. By this time, my mom had also left the hotel room, so no one was there.  

Signs

My collection of entrance signs, 20 National Park Service units visited in all...

June 19

What a Gas!

I thought it would be interesting to chronicle the price of gas across the country this summer...

Home, Sweet Home!

What can I say about today?! We went down for breakfast at the Garden Court Buffet (Portuguese sausage!), loaded up the Odyssey, checked out, gassed up at Costco, and hopped onto I-15 south towards LA! The boys were hungry again by the time we got to Barstow, so we stopped to get something to eat.