Thanksgiving Point

This past weekend we decided to do a sort of spontaneous little family vacation. We still have our Utah Connect Passes that we bought last summer and we wanted to visit more of the attractions and make sure we used as much of the pass as we could. So I got us a hotel room at The Little America and we spent Saturday and Sunday playing so hard we are still exhausted two days later! On Saturday we started out at the Thanksgiving Point Botanical Gardens in Lehi. We didn't really intend to show up for the Fairytale Festival, but sometimes you just get lucky! Haha! Actually the boys didn't want anything to do with the fairy tale stuff, although they did play with the big chess board. Lexi was a sweetheart and let me take a picture of her with Cinderella. Other than that we just explored the pretty gardens for awhile and fed the koi.

After the gardens we had a little picnic in the shade and then went in to explore the Thanksgiving Point Museum of Ancient Life. Since Jurassic World is in theaters right now the kids have really been interested in dinosaurs (Lexi and Zac both went with friends to see it, but the rest of us haven't.) So a dinosaur museum was just the place to be this weekend. The kids learned a lot about dinosaurs, dug in the quarry, played at the sand/erosion table, and we all enjoyed being in the nice air conditioning! They currently have a mythology themed balloon art exhibit at the museum too.

For dinner that night we ate at the Lion House Pantry in downtown Salt Lake which was also part of the Connect Pass. Then the kids swam in the hotel pool (pics of that in a later post) and watched a movie in the hotel until we all fell asleep at about 11:00. Staying up that late is a big treat for our kids who have a pretty consistent 9:00 bedtime. But hey, we were on vacation! Our room was right by the big fountain, which I thought might keep us awake, but luckily it didn't and we all had a good night's sleep.