Feeling Refreshed and Recharged!!

 
Can you guess by this picture where we have been?  We’ve had this trip to Yellowstone planned for a long time!  It was heaven! 
In all we drove around 50 hours roundtrip, making our way through many places and states that we had never been to!

There was plenty of kids getting to enjoy the outdoors to the fullest…

Lots of “way too up-close-and-personal” moments with animals…

Everywhere we went there were so many different kinds of animals from bison, to coyotes, to uinta ground squirrels, to canadian geese, to elk, to moose, to bald eagles, and more!  I have children that want to grow up to be animal rescuers, so this was HUGE to them….

so many beautiful plants that do not grow around us…
 
of course the landscape and views were breathtaking, no matter which way you were looking!!…
 
We actually hiked most of the way to the bottom of that amazing waterfall.  I have 3 pretty young children and was sooo proud of them for doing this difficult and scary hike!  My son told me he was more than just scared, he was, “scared and totally fweaked out!!”  In the end, even he thought it was well worth it! 

We hiked so many trails and went on so many boardwalk paths.  Again, I’m so proud of my kids most of all because they loved it all.  It was not me forcing them into this.  It means so much to me that my children enjoy this kind of thing as much as I do. 

We are trying to visit as many national parks as we can.  They each got their Junior Ranger badges, as they always do, and we got sooo many stamps in our national parks passports!  We love all of the visitor centers and ranger stations with all the history, information, dioramas, and movies!

And we stayed in amazingly cute cabins in the midst of all that beauty!

Our road trip also included a much needed reunion with family, including cousins (and their children that I had never met) that live out of the country, and most of all my wonderful Grandma that I named my daughter after (she’s one of those Grandmas that everyone fights over who gets to name their child after!)! My whole family is super amazing!  I have the most loving and kind Aunts and Uncles, and fun cousins to boot!  I’m so thankful for these wonderful people being in my life!  So much to live up to!

This trip was also partly made with some of my siblings and their families in my car, and caravanning with us!  We have done this so many times and it is always a hoot!  Thanks to Erika’s husband who stopped at all the best places (including an amazingly cute visitor center in such a beautiful setting) and took all the rural roads that made the drive as much of the fun of the trip as the rest of it was!  If you ever need an 11 hour trip to take 16 hours, we’ve got it figured out for you! ;)  I wouldn’t have changed any of it (except maybe my poor nephew who puked, poor guy), and making it longer!  I did not want to leave my family or Yellowstone.

No other vacation or trip could have recharged me like this one did. 

What helps you to recharge and reset your priorities?

Rebecca