Goblin Valley Camping Trip April 2022

 This was our annual Vorkink Camping trip with Ryan's family. This camping trip had its ups and its downs. This camping spot is in BLM land which means there is no running water and, more importantly, no restrooms. Which is generally fine when camping, but less fine when you feel hugely pregnant and you are camping with 20 other people in a big bowl and you have to walk FOREVER in the sand (did I mention WHILE PREGNANT?) to find somewhere to use the bathroom where no one can see you. And also, you are probably aware that pregnant women need to pee a LOT. Anyway, using the bathroom was an ordeal. 

Another problem we ran into was our visit to Goblin Valley. On the day we had planned to go, we drove 40 minutes to get to the park only to find that they were only letting a certain number of cars into the parking lot and then anyone else had to wait for one car to leave to get one more car in. The line of cars was super long, and we ended up turning around. We tried a few more hiking spots only to find everything insanely crowded, so we went back to the campsite. We went on a small hike nearby and then came back to our campsite to find everything trying to blow away. 

That was the other down, that it was SO windy. We spent an entire day of this trip trying to keep our stuff from blowing away. Our tent (which is huge) kept pulling up its stakes in the wind, despite Ryan's every effort to tack it down (big rocks, heavy stuff in those corners inside the tent, etc.) that night ended with Ryan sleeping laying against the side of the inside of the tent to keep it from blowing off the ground. 

We did manage to make it into Goblin Valley state park the next day and the girls had fun climbing around on the fun looking rocks and the adults played hide and go seek. 

I also managed to practice taking pictures of the night sky one of the nights that we were there. The stars are incredible on clear nights because this area is so far away from big towns. I got a few pictures of the Big Dipper! 

And on our first night I asked Ryan to take some maternity pictures of me. I never did that with the girls, and I'm so glad that I did this time around. I love these pictures that Ryan took of me! Anyway, this camping trip was in April and it is now December so I can't remember any other details, but the girls had lots of fun playing in the dirt, no one got very much sleep, we enjoyed being away from the world for a few days, and I was very grateful to be home in my bed and with my toilet afterward.

This picture is funny because I've had this camera tripod for YEARS. Probably at least 10 years. And I've always just screwed the camera onto the stand which takes FOREVER and is so awkward and frustrating. Ryan was saying that we should invent a tripod that clips onto cameras a different way, and then 5 minutes later we figured out that this tripod does exactly that. So, we've been setting it up the super duper long and annoying way for our whole marriage when we could have saved ourselves so much trouble by just looking closer.