A morning adventure...

So, my parents are visiting us this weekend -- they came up on Thursday and are staying till Monday.  We look forward to their visits -- especially the girls, because their grandma spends quality time with them playing board games, teaching them how to crochet (Kate & Brynna, that is), listening to them play the piano with positive feedback (haha -- my comments seem to always be, "Are you using the soft pedal???"  J/K), and the list could go on, but I'll stop there.  And that's not counting all the things my mom does for me: helps me catch up on laundry, etc.

So, this morning we all piled in my car (except Jim who is down in the valley for his football team playoffs -- Go Lobos!!) and headed north to see if we could drive up near the wind generators. My parents are just as fascinated by them as me :).  Anyway, we were able to get close (too close for Kira -- she kept saying, "Can we turn around now??  Okay, we saw them, let's go!  We're getting too close!!!"  (They were pretty formidable up close).  But she did finally get over her fears enough to get out of the car and run around.  Here's some pics:

My dad just outside our car.

By the way, my dad counted 66 of them he could see in the area, including in the distance.  Wow...

Then we piled back in the car to head to Woodruff to see the dam near there and the Little Colorado river canyon.  When we stopped at the dam, I came around to the passenger side door to let my mom out and I heard a hissing noise...which turned out to be the tire. I must have ran over something that punctured it, and it was losing air fast.  Within 10 minutes it was completely flat.  Thank goodness my dad was there!! He put the spare on, so we could drive back home.  [As a side note: I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I've never had to change a tire yet: there's always been some kind of male around to do it.  (Though I'm probably jinxing myself by even writing about this...). I mean, I've seen it done plenty of times, but I'd hate to have to do it on my own. I guess I'm writing this, because one time my sister had a flat, and got out and fixed it herself, not bothering to call anyone to help her. And I'm the one standing pathetically next to my flat hoping someone would stop and help me out...]

Anyway.  Here's some pics from the rest of the morning:

 The dam/waterfall

 Kids by the stream

 Exploring in the trees by the stream

 My wonderful dad changing the tire!

The view off the one-lane bridge we were driving on

Anyway, it was fun -- we decided not to drive on to the canyon -- would hate to get another flat, so we headed back home!  And relaxed for the rest of the day.  The end.

P.S. -- Another reason my dad is so great: we had a random pile of wood outside and he split nearly all of it and stacked it nicely afterwards. Nice! And another reason to feel guilty :)