McAlister Matters

We decided to have a little adventure in Moab with Kahlan and Juniper. Kahlan was the hiking champ and hiked about 5 miles in 2 days! She has infinite energy apparently and wanted to swim in the pool as soon as we got back to the hotel each day. She had fun playing in the sand at the arches and searching for sand as we hiked. Juniper did great once she got used to driving in the car for long stretches and sitting in the backpack carrier. She loves being outside. It was a good time to go with great weather and less crowds. check out the album We also took a lot of VR photos with my phone camera. They look awesome with our VR headset . check out some 360 shots

We completed our California adventure today after a long drive across a cold desert. We had a great time visiting family at McAlister-fest in Fresno. We enjoyed a quick visit to Richmond and relished some delicious Cheeseboard pizza! It was fun to finally meet Milo and join in the birthday fun! Our drive was a success so we anticipate future drives out.   

After four years, Sarah and I decided it was time to conquer Mt. Timpanogos again. It was a tough hike but I think we did pretty good. The weather was perfect and we had most of the trail to ourselves with the exception of some mountain goats.

We headed out to Vernal Utah this weekend with Sarah's family. It's about a 3.5 hour drive to the south east of us through some pretty country. We enjoyed a visit to the Dinosaur National Monument to see a fossil quarry. We went on a hike and enjoyed a couple picnics. The kids had fun swimming at the hotel. On Saturday we went to the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum . We saw one of these on our trip and Kahlan quickly identified it as a lion. :)

We finally made it to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. We'd been delayed by a very rainy spring. It was a hot time of year to go but we still enjoyed visiting this park for the first time.  Capitol Reef is located in between Arches and Zion National Parks. It took us about 4 hours to drive there through some pretty country. We called it a 'mini Zions park' because it was a lot less crowded. There were probably 10 times less people there than at Zions or Arches. So we liked that and enjoyed hiking on practically empty trails. One unique thing about the park is that they grow fruit trees in the middle of it. You can pick the fruit for free to eat and they have a shop that sells fresh fruit pies. So we enjoyed a few pies!

We had a fun trip visiting the family in California. We enjoyed staying at the Russian River for a few days, visiting Turlock and Ripon, and taking Kahlan to the Oakland zoo. On the way back from Ripon Kahlan practiced her ABC's in the car.