Moab was SO much fun! We left Sunday morning after sacrament, and got to Moab in the afternoon. But on our way, we stopped by my mom's house in Parowan to drop off some stuff. It's pretty much tradition that whenever we go up there we have to visit all of the animals in the barn. Well, just a few days before we got there, one of the goats had a baby! And of course, me being the furry-creature-loving person I am, I had to hold and love this new baby!
Isn't he just adorable?! He must have been hungry when I picked him up because he started nibbling on me and didn't stop until I put him down!
When we finally go to Moab, we checked into our hotel, and then took a walk around town. It was a nice, relaxing way to start our vacation!
The next morning was our anniversary! We woke up and were out the door by 7:30. Ben had told me he had a special present for me...
And this was it!
Horseback riding! :D
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| Ben on his horse, Ringo |
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| On the trail! |
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| My view :) |
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| At the halfway point |
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| Have you seen Mission: Impossible II? That tower out there, called Castle Rock, was where the first scene was filmed. |
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| Funny face :P |
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| Handsome Boy! |
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| Haha, oops! The camera was still zoomed in! |
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| He kept making funny faces at me.. :) |
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| Ben & Ringo |
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| Jess & Buster |
Here's a few shots of the backyard of the ranch place where we went for our horseback ride.
Ben said he wanted to drive up the road a little way before we went back into town so we could see Castle Rock a little better.
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| Silly boy (: |
After we ate lunch, we headed out to Arches National Park. We decided that every time we go back to Moab, we are going to try something new, and we will always do one thing that is the same.
The new adventure this go-round was horseback riding.
Our tradition every time we go will be to hike to Delicate Arch and take a photo like this..
We did it last year, and it will be really cool to look back someday at all the times we have gone to Delicate Arch and to look at how we've changed over the years.
(We won't go back to Moab every year, but we've decided that we want to go back on our milestone anniversaries.. like 5, 10, 20, etc. years)
We saw a couple of guys taking pictures under the arch, and the guy taking the picture was laying down on the ground. Ben caught on to what they were doing and said we needed to do it too!
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| I'm so strong I can hold up the arch all by my self! HA! :D |
We both love Delicate Arch.. it's so beautiful, and the process that happened to form this arch and all the others in the park is pretty amazing!
Okay, so Ben has given me a new nickname recently. I am now his "Little Lamb." This name comes from a little noise I involuntarily make when I do something like drop my stuff, or knock something over, stuff like that. It's sort of like a "bah" noise. And Ben says I sound like a baby sheep. Anyway, to get to the point, we went to the visitor center at Arches National Park, and outside they have bronze statues of some different kinds of animals. One of them was a mother mountain sheep and it's baby. Ben just gave me this look, like, "we gotta do it."
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| My eyes look funny because the sun was SO bright, and right in my face! |
Inside the visitor center, they have those telescope/binocular things to look up the side of the cliff. I'm guessing they were intended for kids, because we both had to bend over pretty good to even get our eyes in them. Ben was about to walk away from it, when I told him to stop so I could get a picture.. and this is what he gave me. He poked out his bum as far as he could, the silly boy. :)
That night for dinner, we went to a pretty fancy place to eat. We sat out on the patio, and were serenaded with live music. I should have gotten a picture, but this guy was awesome. He just looked like he was made to sing the blues. His skin was leathery and wrinkled, and he just had that "blues" look about him. And he was pretty talented too!
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| At Dinner |
When we got back to the hotel, we decided to eat our cake! We brought it with us to Moab in a cooler. I've heard that some wedding cakes are yucky after they've been in the freezer for a year, but ours was still pretty good! For that, I need to thank Danielle. She did a fantastic job of wrapping it up!
The next day we spent walking around town wandering around in all the gift stores. Then later in the afternoon we went for a swim in the pool at our hotel. That night for dinner, we went to the Moab Brewery. Their food was so yummy! And they had some pretty cool decorations, too!
If you look close, you can see cans down in front on the right, and then right behind it a huge bottle of hot sauce! It was probably three cans tall!
The next morning we went back to the visitor center at Arches to buy a cookbook we saw the day before. When we were checking out of our hotel that morning, we saw a bunch of corvettes in the hotel parking lot. And they followed us to the park! Haha.
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| In the hotel parking lot |
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| In the visitor center parking lot |
I guess they were a car club (or something) from California!
On the way home from Moab, we received the phone call from the Air Force recruiter that Ben had been working with, and he was told that he had not been accepted to the Air Force. We were sad, but not heart broken because we had been talking about alternate options just in case. We are currently formulating a plan for what steps to take next. Because it's not concrete yet, I don't want to say we're going to do specifically, but I will say that it involves a few more years of schooling for Ben. :)
Well, I can't believe it's been a whole year since Ben and I were married! It seems like time has gone by so fast. But you know what they say, "Time flies when you're having fun!" And we have definitely been doing just that. We love each day that we are blessed to spend with each other, and we are so grateful to have such a beautiful, crazy life together!
