President's Day weekend: Clayton in Colorado,...sweet hotel for the rest of us

Clayton's obsessed with climbing. Ever since he came home from working at the climbing rock at Camp Browning last summer, he's been on the mountain or in a climbing gym almost daily. He and some of his climbing friends decided it was taking too long for spring to come and that they should drive to Colorado and do some "ice climbing" in Ouray. I'd never heard of the place but I guess it's considered one of the top places to ice climb in the world. Clayton pulled it up on You Tube one day and we were amazed how cool/scary it looked. Here's some of the pix that were taken of his trip over President's Day weekend:

 This was a shot right outside their hotel room

 Cool place huh?

These babies serve as your hands in ice climbing

Here's the gang

 You see that little line going from top to bottom...that's the top rope that they would climb up

 you kind of have to squint to see them climbing in this one

 Clayton hard at it

 Looks pretty cold but fun

 I like this picture of Clayton-he's got a great smile and whenever he's doing something that he wants to do, you'll see this.  He had a great time and everyone got home safe.  The rest of our family decided that Clayton shouldn't have all the fun and we stayed in a hotel in Salt Lake right after church on Sunday.  The kids could hardly sleep the night before because they were so excited to go.  Anybody heard of hotwire.com?  It's my new favorite website when we need to book a hotel.  We got a 4 star hotel for $82 and it was awesome.  The kids loved the lobby area where they had these fancy wood tables with inlaid wood squares that made a checkerboard design...along with the checker pieces that were as big as your hand.  We spent a bit of time there.  In the morning all the kids ate free for breakfast except for Eli since he was over 12.  It was one of those sweet breakfast buffets with one of those cool Belgian Waffle makers (I think Liam had 3 or 4).  We did have a little bit of a mishap while we were there.  Eli brought up his EZ pod which is the device for his growth hormone shots.  Well, it needed to be refrigerated and we thought it would be ok to put it in a double baggie and stick it on some ice for the night.  Bad idea...ice eventually melts.  We woke up to a drowned device which didn't even turn on.  Luckily we called the powers that be and were sent a new one at no charge the next day...whew!  Basically we did a lot of relaxing, hanging out and sitting in the hot tub...you gotta love that.  The next day we cruised up to Park City and hung out for the day.  Liam was beyond excited when we found the shoes that he's been dying to get for spring...for 15 bucks!  We had a great time together and missed Clayton-he had some of his climbing pix already posted on Facebook the same day he arrived so it was cool to keep tabs on him and keep our fingers crossed that he'd make it out of there alive.  Here are a few shots of the hotel where we stayed.  The chairs and table by the big windows are the checkerboard tables-too much fun.  My kids also look forward so much to the vending machines at any hotel we go to-it's one of the highlights of any stay.  We load our pockets with change and head down to the dumb vending machine...whatever floats their boat I guess.