Pioneer Day

July 24th is Pioneer Day in Utah.

We always have a fun day filled with reminders of our pioneer heritage.

I am glad I have pioneers in my ancestry. Otherwise, I would really hate this holiday. We didn't get a day off work, but I took a personal day. I'm sure this totally annoyed the non-pioneer-descendants at work.

Here is Dylan dressed as a pioneer in the kids' parade. My other kids did not dress up, so they aren't pictured. I remember how horrified I was when I realized that the "chips for wood" that the pioneer children hunted on the plains were actually dried out cow poo patties. That is SO nasty. I honor my pioneer ancestors for collecting dried poo for their camp fires. I know the depravations of the mormon pioneers included things far worse that having to pick up dried poo with no prospect of water for hand washing, but still, that is pretty nasty. We are pretty lucky to only have to look back and remember. Cheers, pioneers!

Pioneer children sang as they walked,

and walked and walked and walked.

Pioneer children sang as they walked,

and walked and walked and walked.

They washed at streams and worked and played,

Sundays they camped and read and prayed.

Week after week they sang as they walked,

and walked and walked and walked.

Albuquerque BioPark

Our road trip included a stop at the Albuquerque BioPark, which was fantastic, again I highly recommend it. The park includes the aquarium, the botanical gardens, the zoo, and something called Tingey Beach which is a bunch of lakes and ponds. We only had time for the botanic gardens and the aquarium. Here I am in one of the gardens. Dylan and I were trying to turn off the giant faucet.

Inside the botanic gardens campus they have a butterfly house. One of the doscents pulled us aside (not many visitors that day, I guess) and related a TON of really interesting information about butterflies, caterpillars, and chrysalids. Here is the "nursery" in the butterfly house. You could see butterflies in various emergent states here.

We also checked out the aquarium. Dylan got a little stressed about the manta rays. He was consoled by confiming that there really was glass there. The rays were having a great time freaking out the visitors by swimming slowly up to the window and then suddenly swooping up the glass.

YOU MUST VISIT ALBUQUERQUE.

Carlsbad Caverns

Back on the road after our adventures in Roswell, we drove south to Carlsbad, NM, which is a scary, scary one-road slum of a town close to the US border. Its one redeeming quality is the proximity of the most fantastic of our National Parks that I have ever seen.

I think it cost our whole family about $15 to go into the caverns by elevator (100 stories down). We hit a few of the attractions in the visitor's center before we went down:

This is my favorite rock formation inside the enormous cavern--the lion's tail. It was pretty dark, so most of my photos are hard to see. The entire cave system is dramatically lit ala broadway by stage lighting experts, but still dark in general.

I HIGHLY recommend a trip to visit if you are anywhere in the state at all. You can eat lunch at the Sonic without actually unlocking your car doors, so you should be relatively safe. When we go down again to visit Heather and Jason, we are going to go in the evening and check out the bat flight, which is supposed to be really great as well. Below is Nick taking a picture of an interesting rock formation inside the caverns:

And here is the rock formation of interest:

ALIEN CHASE RACE!!!

My sister Heather and I ran the big UFO Festival 10K race ...the "Alien Chase." But the only alien I got to chase was her. She's small but FAST. I guess we look enough alike in our alien suits that every race volunteer I passed did a double take and yelled, "HEY, didn't you just run past here?" It was a fun race and true to form, I didn't bother to hydrate the day before and had a screaming headache the rest of that day. On a good note, Heather gave me some Alieve which I had never tried before and I've been using ever since. YAY, Alieve!

Cox Family Blog Famine Ends

For the three people that read my blog, THE DROUGHT IS OVER (notice i backdated this post)!! Lucky for you, however, the fun of Roswell continues. This post contains photos of the Alien Parade in Roswell, which takes place annually over the 4th of July weekend. Above you see my sister, Heather, and the boys with Spiderman (not an alien, but nevertheless, REAL, mom!).

...AND...

Yes, look closely, that IS Mitch English, former Channel 12 weather man who left Salt Lake City in disgust (no one "got" him) for the booming metropolis of....ROSWELL....and his power move earned him a spot in the parade on this VW Bug. Poor Mitch. Betcha he likes SLC alot better now:) Nice dress, tho'.

Still in Roswell...

After the Marvel Comic Book Heroes we took the opportunity to drive around town a little bit.
We saw some crazy stuff. This photo below shows the weirdest.

Friday afternoon in Roswell

Found some good photo opps in downtown Roswell. Here are a few:

The Adventure Continues...

After the super heroes "show," we ventured into the heart of the UFO Festival: the Visitor's Center in Roswell, which hosted the Alien Expo. The Expo was basically a free-for-all of alien abductees, anti-alien freedom fighters, and, yes, alien and alien/human hybrids. Here are the boys with my sister in the foyer. These are fake aliens.

We might have opted for face-painting or FULL BODY alien make-up at this booth--but we didn't.

Not sure about this guy...something about ancient cliff paintings being done by aliens (totally ubiquitous theory).

I think this guy dropped out of school to start his alien conspiracy theory publishing company. Nick caught it right away. Resistance CAN be fertile, I guess. If you want to see more about the actual theories, I'm going to post some excerpts to my personal blog in a day or two.

This lady was well-protected from alien mind ray interference.

So was he.

Roswell Adventure, Day One

We arrived in Roswell Friday around midday. My sister urged us to go straight into town so and see the Marvel Super Hero show near the visitor's center. We made it in time to see the show, which was basically Iron Man and Spidey urging us to be "green" and recycle, conserve, etc, with Green Goblin of the baggy panties (he had alot of extra room in there) urging us to throw our garbage in the river. Unfortunately, there was a big wash/river running right next to the visitor's center and it appeared that the Roswell residents/aliens favor Green Goblin's approach more that Spidey and Iron Man's.

Captain America's undies kept peeking out from his costume. Why do I always notice these things?

The Coxes, completely rapt.

Another "visitor"

And her well-heeled (heh, heh) companion...

Alien Adventure Begins

This is what we found waiting for us at my sister's house in Roswell, NM after a LONG drive. It was the beginning of what I can only call a FREAKY weekend of aliens, dehydration, kidney stones and baggy-pantied super heroes.

The Alien Cake's antennae say "GREETINGS, NICK," "GREETINGS MADDIE," AND "GREETINGS DYLAN." And inside, the cake was very, very red. And nummy.