St George for Soccer

 We took the family to St George because Kylee's team played in a soccer tournament.  We stopped in Provo to break up the drive.  The kids swam and for the first time ever, I didn't have to swim with them or put Kaden in a life jacket.  No worries!  It's a very freeing feeling!

When we got to St George, the weather was pretty great so we went to the biggest park there to waste some time and enjoy the outdoors.  It was a really big park!  Sadie played on her favorite- the swings.  Otherwise we just kicked a soccer ball around and explored a little.

The hotel we stayed at had a heated pool, which is great because though it was warmer than Idaho, it wasn't exactly swimming weather.  But the heated pool helped and the kids enjoyed it.  I got to sit and chill.

On to soccer!  Playing soccer in February is difficult.  They hadn't played outside in months.  But the grass was so short and ground so hard that it was actually kind of similar to indoors.

Our team played hard, but we didn't quite pull out any wins.  We are apparently not conditioned to play on the big field right now.  But they worked really hard and we learned what we need to work on.  Kylee was put in as defensive mid, which is new for her.  She does well, but she has a problem with everyone yelling at her to take a shot when she doesn't feel like she has a good shot.  I think she needs to have a little more faith in herself, but she is right, it's hard to get a nice big kick off when you are falling backwards or something.  She did take some shots, but no luck.

During their Saturday afternoon game, a huge storm rolled in.  It's so annoying because the weather was pretty perfect the rest of the weekend.  I went for a long run that morning and it was beautiful.  But the storm interrupted the game and we had to take cover and wait for it to pass.  Then we came back and finished just fine.

When we booked the hotel, we knew there was a chance they wouldn't make it to the championship game on Monday.  We decided that we would call it a family vacation and spend time exploring the area on Sunday and Monday.  But Ryan got wind of a storm coming through Utah Sunday night and Monday morning and he wanted to get out of there before we had to deal with driving in that.  Even though we had already paid for the last night in the hotel.  But I really wanted to at least do one trail.  So we packed up and started driving and stopped at Red Reef Trail just a little north of St George.  It was really cool!

How stunning are the red rocks against the snowy mountains? 

This looks scarier than it was, though it was a bit scary...

This was fun, and only scary trying to get Kaden across it.  He was a little scared, but really the footholds were really secure.

Ryan climbed up high and took a few shots but the rest of us did not.

There was a storm that hit Sunday night.  I heard of at least one of her teammates that were stuck in it.  But we made it all the way home without any problems.  And it did storm Monday.  A lot.  And I wasn't all that sad about being in Idaho again because Kylee and I went snowboarding :)