HooDoo You Love?

Apparently I'm a fan of theme songs for our stops, so here's a shout out to George Thorogood & The Destroyers:

Who Do You Love?

After Zion, our "Honda wagon" took us to Bryce Canyon National Park.  To be honest, I was a little skeptical because I loved Zion so much and thought a park 1.5 hours away was probably very similar (here you see my Texas sense of distance, where 6 hours of driving can look almost exactly the same) but couldn't possibly be as stunning or enjoyable as Zion in the heat... especially since there is no water in Bryce.

Turns out, despite both being in canyon-lands, Bryce looks completely different than Zion.  And because Bryce is at such a higher elevation, it was much cooler (high of ~90)!  There's no "better" park - they were both stellar in their own way.  

We loved Bryce because it was so incredibly unique!  The limestone rock formations are called 'hoodoos' and make the views so interesting.  If I intentionally tried to design something beautiful in nature, I could never have come up with something like Bryce.  It definitely made me more aware of what a creative Creator we have.  

We drove through the park and then hiked ~6 hours down into the canyons and back up.  Daniel and I both felt the hike was significantly more difficult, probably because that was the second consecutive day of hiking, there were several elevation changes in our hike and because we were at a higher elevation.  It rained on us a bit, but that cleared out the trails so we were the only ones down in the canyon through most of the hike.

Cooper has done amazing hiking.  Most of the time he looks like this:

But every now and then, we get a little of this:

Favorite moment: stopping to nurse Cooper on a rock when it began to rain, Daniel holding a jacket (THANK YOU Tammie, we love our Columbia jackets and have used them so many times!) over our heads, then changing a diaper under a tree right as it began to pour.  If we both didn't have our hands full, I totally would have documented it with a photo...

Also, I'd like to document the fact that Daniel said to Cooper "When you're older, I'm taking you to Toys-R-Us and letting you buy whatever you want because of how awesome you were on this trip." This kid has been incredible on the road!  He smiles and coos in all the random beds and chairs we put him on, as he sits in our laps while we eat on the road, he's nursed in the Ergo while hiking, in random corners of restaurants, in the car, while sitting on the ground to the side of hiking trails, in 110+ degree heat, etc. etc.  What a champ.  He's currently sleeping in a hotel chair.  :)