Galaxy Quest

RD's had me watch a number of movies he enjoyed growing up, and most of them I dislike. In fact, we have pretty differing tastes in movies, but one of the movies he had me see was Galaxy Quest. I don't recommend it, but there's one scene they're on an alien planet with crazy rock formations. That place is actually here in Utah, Goblin Valley State Park, and we'd heard it was a lot of fun to visit, so we planned to go right after winter semester at BYU was over.  Unfortunately, the weather was going to be windy, high in the 50's and low 30's, and I petitioned to postpone it so we wouldn't be too cold (remembering camping at Bad Bear in the 30's). We couldn't go the next week, so two weeks later we packed up the van and took the kids out of school early, RD anxious to leave by 12:30.
He was anxious to leave early since I wanted to get a camping spot in the state park, so we could have pit toilets. There's BLM land around, but I had never been camping in the dirt, and didn't really want to. (We had talked about how we might end up having to do it, and told the kids about it. When we first told Aubree we might have to dig a hole and go potty in the dirt, she got an incredulous look on her face and said " that'll be crazy!" She thought it pretty funny, and we thought her pretty cute.) We got there around 4 pm Thursday afternoon, and thought our chances pretty good, but it was full.
Doh!
So we headed out on the road a few minutes to find a spot off the road to camp. There were already campers set up along the rocks, but we found a sweet spot the rocks curved around and isolated us from others, providing lots of climbing and playing opportunities.

                         
Kids climbed and jumped and ran around exploring, and we started to set up camp.

 Cameron and Grace were like mountain goats, climbing and jumping around, playing hide n seek with Aubree.

We were blowing up camp pads when our portable battery air pump petered out after a few seconds into blowing up the queen mattress. :( The kids have great pads that we blowup manually anyway they're so quick, but blowing up that queen mattress made RD and I lightheaded, and probably killed more brain cells than we could spare. Most of us also had a new experience of going potty in front of all of creation, which really wasn't all that great. There was no one for miles we could see, but anyone for miles could see us, which was rather unnerving for me.  We loved having enough space around us to feel alone and be able to explore.

 Doesn't that remind you of Tatooine? Maybe cause Reese has a stick waved menacingly...

We'd brought dinner along, but got a fire going for smores, and hung out around the fire, hoping the smoke would deter the gnats. It didn't, so Reese and Bree and I took refuge in the tent for a bit. Poor Bree got a bunch of swollen itchy spots from their bites. They calmed down as it got darker, and we waited for it to get dark enough to use the much-anticipated black light to hunt for scorpions. Most of the kids went with RD looking for scorpions, and after awhile they found one, and thought it was pretty cool.
                                    
We all went for another look, but didn't find any more, which we were kind of ok with. Eventually we all settled in for bed, and thankfully didn't have any nighttime drama. No bears in the desert thank goodness!