Memorial Day weekend family vacation

This weekend we had a great time as a family, both separately and together. Friday, after the girls got out of school, we got on the road and drove to Mesquite to stay with the Vogels (Kevin's sister). It took us about nine hours to drive out there. On the way we saw trains, rain, stars (Katie calls them stars, they are really wind machines), snow on the mountains above Tehachapi, motorcycles, and all kinds of other fun stuff. The weather was cool this week. Just like in Kerman, it had been unseasonably hot the week before an then had cooled off considerably! It was great weather!!!

We stopped in Barstow for dinner. We laughed as we were leaving, because the train that we passed going through the tunnels near Tehachapi passed us in the parking lot in Barstow.

On Saturday morning Kevin and I kissed our children good-bye and left for Las Vegas. We first went to North Las Vegas and met with my sister, Candace, aka Sister Marshall, and took her and her companion, Sister Jones, to lunch. We went to Red Robin and had a long lunch so that we could catch up and get to know each other better. While Candace and Sister Jones were in the bathroom, I called Corissa on her cell phone and found out she is having a girl so that I could tell Candace. We also took a photo together on my phone and sent it as a picture message to my dad.

From there we did a little geocaching and then checked into the hotel and got ready for the concert. (Read the previous post for the concert info.)

Sunday morning we were awakened at 5:15am by a tour bus starting up and revving it's engines for about an hour. Arg! We were really hoping for more than four hours of sleep. We did get a little bit more, but not much. We got some breakfast at the hotel and then checked out and did some geocaching around Las Vegas and on the way back to Mesquite. We saw a few caches that we decided to wait for the next day when we had the girls with us. We found twenty though, so we did well.

We got back to Mesquite and our kids were running around with their cousins, barely noticing that we had returned. The next morning they we not overly thrilled to hear that we were leaving. Even the promise that they would see their cousins again in a few weeks when Rebecca is baptized was not much of a consolation. We are glad that they all get along together so well! We took some pictures (without a whole lot of cooperation on the part of the kids) and then we were off.

We drove back down to North Las Vegas to see Candace for a little while and the girls could meet her. We were glad we had the chance to visit with her! It had been eleven years since I last saw her.

We did a lot of caching in Las Vegas with the girls, taking them to the caches that we knew that they would like. Through several of the caches we learned a lot about the history of the area. We love virtual caches! We went to the Natural History Museum and saw the huge aluminum dinosaur. We went to the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort and looked at all the historical exhibits. We went by the Neon Graveyard and looked at all the old neon signs from all over Las Vegas that are waiting for the proposed Neon Museum to be built. We drove down the Strip and saw all the sights of Las Vegas.

We also took them to the Mandalay Bay casino to show them where the concert was and where we took the photos, etc. We found the last cache in Las Vegas at the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, had dinner and hit the road for Kerman. It was 4:30pm, which was MUCH later than we had planned on leaving, so we figured we would not have time to stop for any caches. We were going along pretty well (there is usually a huge amount of traffic returning from Las Vegas after the Memorial Day weekend! I-15 is usually a parking lot!), until we got to Primm, which is right on the state border. There was an accident in California and it had backed traffic up all the way into Nevada, so we pulled off in Primm and did a few fun caches. Our first earth cache and another one that was right on the fence line and we took a picture of the girls with one foot in Nevada and the other foot in California.

By 6:30pm we were back on the road and we did okay until we got to Baker. We stopped there for an hour and then we inched forward until we got to the Ag Inspection Station and then after that it was fairly clear all the way through. Although by then we were so far behind that we didn't get home until after 3:00am!

So lots of family, lots of geocaching (30 total!) and lots of fun, but not a lot of sleep!