The Trip to Arizona - by Kienna Cahoon

with a few added notes by Mom.

 

My family (except for my dad), my aunt and cousin and I slept at my Gran’s house on August 16^th, 2011 and got ready to leave at five o’clock in the morning to start our trip down to Arizona.  We picked up Aunty Beryl and Aunty Brookie on the way down on the first day.  We were in the cars for 15 hours that day and then stopped at a hotel in Utah.  I was excited to be in Utah, because that is where I was born.  My sisters, Kaia and Saryn, slept at my Aunty Brittany’s house, but I got to sleep at the hotel.

We decided to travel another 5 hours the next day and went to St. George, Utah.  We went to a restaurant that had yummy, yummy tacos named Café Rio.  I remember that we were in a desert, there were a lot of desert kind of trees and it was burning hot.  We went to Brigham Young’s Winter House and saw really cool, old stuff in it.  We also learned a lot about silk making, how they lived in the desert back in the day before electricity etc.  It was a REALLY fascinating tour.

We went to our hotel, and went swimming.  I almost swam across the pool for the first time.

After swimming, we got ready to go to The Little Mermaid at the theatre.  It was an awesome play!  They had little glowing waves and the eels were so cool.  I got the see the Orchestra and they even had a cello.  I thought Sebastian was really funny.  After the play, we got to meet them and take pictures with them.  The Tuacahn Theatre is amazing.  I couldn't believe the ability to flood the stage and make it feel like you were actually under water and then  bring you up onto the land again.  They had really neat special effects, the songs were amazing with phenomenal harmonies.  They also had free babysitting for kids 2 and under.  Seriously AWESOME!

 

After St. George, we went through Zions National Park, and then went to the Grand Canyon!  Jaymeson almost got lost there.  I felt very scared because he might have fallen down into the canyon.  We got to climb lots of trees there and pretend that the grass was lava.  We got to see a lot of old stones that looked shiny and beautiful.  Some of them were over a thousand million years old.  We saw some California Condors and they were humongous.  I also got a Junior Ranger badge.  We had a lot of fun at the Grand Canyon.

Just wanted to add a little about the whole "Jaymeson almost got lost there" thing.  This was possibly the most terrifying moment of my life.  It's fun to see how Kienna can skim over it, but it was still a big enough ordeal that she remembered it almost 6 months later.  I can promise you that losing a child ANYWHERE is scary, but on the rim of the Grand Canyon is about as terrifying as it comes.  He had been strapped into a stroller the whole time, but we took him out to take a family picture and he wandered off pretty quickly.  We were in a large group, thought he was in the other half of the group, and wandered up to the shuttle where we all met up and realized he was gone.  My Mom and I got off immediately, but the shuttle bus driver had to shut the doors immediately (she was SO rude and unsympathetic I could have punched her), so our group was separated.  I had to leave the rest of my kids with everyone else, and all of them not knowing what happened or if he was okay.  My Mom and I took off, sounded the alarm to all these wonderful French people that Kaia had been chatting with, we all took off in a hurry and found him within a minute.  Luckily, we found him playing with some rocks, completely clueless as to the fact that he had made everyone have heart attacks.  A lady had seen him and was watching him closely to make sure he was okay until his parents came.  I burst into tears when I saw him and was so incredibly grateful that there are amazing people out there still.  We hear about all the creeps, but I felt like I owed the world to those people who helped us that day.  We reunited about an hour and a half later with the other group who had to stay on the shuttle bus and had a good cry/sigh of relief.  

We had a super fun trip down to Arizona and did lots of fun things.  It was also kinda boring in the car all the time, but I promised when I was sworn in as a Junior Ranger, I will never, never ask, “Are we there yet?”, so I didn’t.

 I had to include this picture because it shows more what Kienna was doing when she was being "sworn in".  She was picking at a bun and eating little bits through the whole thing.  I wish I had this on video, it was seriously hysterical.