Early Anniversary Trip

For the past few years Ryan and I have taken a trip - of some sort or another - for our anniversary. Some years it is a bigger/longer trip, and some years it is a shorty trip. This year we decided to do things a little different and since it was going to be a short trip we decided to take our kids along. Nothing screams "Happy Anniversary" like 4 kids and a two day road trip!! :) There was no school on Monday, so that is when we decided to leave.

Because time and funds were short this year we stayed pretty close to home and took the kids to Jackson Hole, WY! We had so much fun and, of course, the time just flew by.

The first place we went to was the Visitors Center where they take you on an old school bus (Rhett's first ride on a school bus....super exciting!) down the road to where they start the sleigh ride.

(Check out the sleigh in the background) Ryan went on these - see the elk - sleigh rides a few times in young mens and loved it. So...this was his main reason for wanting to go to Jackson Hole. The kids really liked seeing the elk and it was even cooler because we were on a horse drawn sleigh ride. The sleigh ride was about 15 minutes too long for Rhett and Laiklie and they both started having meltdowns, but we survived and it really was a neat experience. We then took the kids to one of the museum/gallery's up on the hill and we had a good time there too. They had a kids section that had a cute little puppet stand and an art station and a few touchy feely educational things. The kids thought it was great....we all agreed though that it wasn't worth the money and we were really annoyed that there was absolutely no photography allowed in the gallery, so that means....no pictures of my kids doing all the fun things they got to do. Bummer! Jackson also has a Ripley's Believe it or Not, but because of some of the pictures on the website we found about it we didn't know if it would scare some of our kids so we decided not to do that this go around. If any of you have gone there - I want to know how it is?!

The one thing we went to Jackson Hole for (other than the elk) was to swim at their inexpensive, very cool rec. center. BUT....unfortunately this has to wait until another trip. They didn't have any "public open swim" until 3:30 pm and the first night we were doing the elk sleigh ride so we never even thought to go to the swimming pool - mostly because I ASSUMED (bad thing to do) that they would have some open swim sometime during the day the next day. So, because Ryan and I both had to be home early we bypassed the swimming at Jackson and voted to stop at Heise on the way home. Jackson isn't so far away that we can't drive up one of these afternoons to swim and Heise seemed to be fine with the kids.

It was kind of nice this year to celebrate an early anniversary with kids in tow. We had a great 2 days together with our little family!