Weekend trip to Moab

We'd been wanting to go camping, but every weekend had some conflict.  And then August was surprisingly rainy.  We decided to go to Moab and Arches.  Our original plan was to camp, but the day we were planning to leave, the forecast said it would rain, so we quickly booked a last minute hotel.  So glad we did!  It did rain.  Which meant that the park wasn't super crowded, and it wasn't too hot to hike!  Worked out great for us!

Saturday was overcast and it rained a couple of times, but we hiked to tons of Arches.  Both boys had a fabulous time.  Collin even said, "I love hiking!  I'm the king of hiking!"  Here's tons of pictures:

Balanced Rock

Double Arch - Rained on us while we hiked out to them, but not enough to make us wet.

Greg and Collin climbed up so they could look directly under the arches.

Then we hiked up to one of the windows.  The whole round trip hike to both was pretty long, and we only had a day and a half, so we just did the close one and went back.

Then we did the sand dune arch.  Because it had rained the sand was easier to walk on.  Both boys loved this "hike".  They thought it was so fun to play in the sand!

Family picture under the arch!

Collin created a group of sand "people" on the rock that he said was our family.

I can't remember what this one was called, but it was a super short hike!

The longest hike we did all day was to the Broken Arch.  We went the back way, and it seemed we were the only ones who did the hike!  No one was on the trail until towards the end of our hike.  We were nervous that we weren't on a trail at all at times because of the lack of people and markers!

We found this awesome tree!

We took a wrong way and found two spires.

At first we were just gonna say that this was the Broken Arch, but then a couple hiked past us so we followed them and found the real one. 

The Broken Arch (we think...)

Sunday we checked out of our hotel and headed back to the park to do the Delicate Arch hike.  I remembered it being long and kinda tough, but it was tougher with a pregnant woman and two littles.  It was hotter than yesterday, and there isn't much shade on the trail.  That drained Collin's energy pretty quick.  Greg ended up carrying Tate in the pack and Collin on his shoulders for quite a bit of it.  Most people who passed us couldn't believe he was doing that, and even commented on it.

When we reached the arch multiple people said, "Wow!  I can't believe you guys made it!  That's a tough hike!  We thought for sure you'd turn around."  It was tough, but we did it!

Almost there, and a tiny bit of shade!

Greg and Collin hiked down into the bowl to get closer to the arch.

We had some snacks for lunch while at the arch.

I'm glad we did it on its own day.  I don't think we could have done much else in the park if we had done this hike Saturday.  After getting back to the car, we headed home.  It was such a fun weekend trip!