Thanksgiving trip

What a fun vacation! We couldn't be with extended family this year, and we wanted to get some time at the temple, so we chose Denver for Thanksgiving. We left Wednesday morning and went straight south through Chadron and Alliance Nebraska to see how far some people in our stake travel for stake conference. We saw a billboard for “Car-henge” and just HAD to check it out! It was a field with cars from the 50s 60s & 70s standing up on end just like Stonehenge in England. Hilarious! These kinds of goofy roadside attractions don’t make it into the art history books, but are really such fun creative expressions. We had lunch there and messed around for almost an hour.
As we drove we noticed signs for Chimney Rock and Scott’s Bluff of the Oregon Trail fame, so we pulled off the highway to take a look at them too. I like it when traveling includes time for wandering and discovering too.

We headed out bright and early Thanksgiving morning for the Denver Zoo. We had a great time. As I’m sure you are aware, we are quite the zoo snobs after having San Diego zoo passes for 8 years and the Denver Zoo did not disappoint. It was chilly, but beautiful for late November. Here are photos of each of us with our favorite animals; J & the monkeys, AJ & the giant anteater, me & the okapi, S & the penguins, and M & the wildest, noisiest monkey of all.

We headed over to the Denver Aquarium & Restaurant to have their Thanksgiving buffet dinner. They said it was impossible to fit us in without a reservation, so we just took in the aquarium instead. Honestly the zoo had such a nice Tropical Discovery Center that the Aquarium was sort of blurred into it.

I think everybody’s favorite part was the ray petting pool. S was super reluctant to touch them at first, but there was a particularly friendly pale grey ray that finally won her over and she even fed it a little fish. J is our fearless animal lover and he would have jumped right in with the sting rays if they'd have let him.

As we were leaving I just slipped into the restaurant to see if we could get in and just happened to get the right hostess who said we could! The food was NOT remarkable, but the setting was fabulous; thousands of beautiful fish swimming passed us and bubbly blue lighting.

Friday morning we visited the Children’s Museum. I can’t even remember how long we played in the woodland tree root tunnels but it was at least an hour. There were little forest creature costumes; AJ was an adorable bunny, J was a mole, a blue bird and a squirrel and S was a brown bird. M was amazing in the bubble room.  The kinetic science room was full of balls and tracks that you could reconfigure into your own paths from the vacuum pipes that sucked the ball up to tracks that ran along the ceiling and down to the other end of your track. The balls would also fall down inside a couple of clear walls with obstacles you could manipulate to send them down different paths and finally up to a big clear bin on the ceiling that would periodically dump the balls on everyone’s heads!

I loved the stained glass colors in the Denver temple. AJ couldn’t understand why he got to go into the Brigham City temple, but not this one.

Saturday morning on our way out of town we stopped at the Butterfly Pavillion. Oh my! So cool. J and I held Rosie the real live tarantula! We got to watch them release 50 new butterflies and one landed on S’s shirt! There was a play space that occupied the kids for as long as mom and dad could stand it.

We listened to several audiobooks as we drove: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, The Dragon’s Eye and The Book of Three. It was lightly raining as we got to the Black Hills and it snowed all Sunday, so we were really thankful to be back safe and sound to our own comfy cozy little house ahead of the storm.

I’ll sign off with a really great quote that was read in church on Sunday. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” ~Melody Beattie