Clark Planetarium

Last weekend we had a four day Staycation in Salt Lake City to celebrate Tyson's dad's 70th birthday. It was a whirlwind of fun activities with never a dull moment! We arrived at our hotel, The Hyatt Place, on Friday afternoon and checked in. The Clark Planetarium was just a short walk away so we decided to go there first. I had purchased Groupons for the Utah Connect Passes which gets you into 13 Utah Attractions at a very discounted rate and was told I could redeem them at the Planetarium. Apparently I received faulty information though and we had to make a rather long, hot walk to the Salt Palace to redeem the coupons and get our passes before we could start enjoying the attractions. I was not impressed and had started to doubt whether we were going to have a fun weekend after all! Luckily, pretty much everything else went according to plan for the rest of the trip and we had a great time.

At the planetarium we checked out all the exhibits for awhile. They had lots of fun hands on experiments to teach kids about weather and space. We tried to take a family picture on Mars but apparently our two youngest had the sillies and were trying to hide from Martians! Drake is in the picture, but you have to look close!

The Utah Connect Pass paid for two shows at the Planetarium.  We saw the show Supervolcanoes in the Hansen Dome Theater which was pretty cool. I may never want to visit Yellowstone after learning it is long overdue for a major eruption though! We also saw a 3D movie in the Imax theater called Island of Lemurs which was about the lemurs on Madagascar.  It was really cute  and I didn't come away from it terrified to visit Madagascar, so I'd have to say it was my favorite of the two shows!

On the walk back to the hotel we stopped by The Gateway which is an old train station. It had pretty stained glass windows and old fashioned ticket windows. A little later we walked to Crown Burger for dinner and then went back to the hotel to rest our weary feet.  Day one of the Staycation was a major success!