This summer we took our first big family vacation that did not involve a trip to visit other family members. It was also Ethan's first long car trip. We left Cedar Park at 4:00am on July 27th and headed to Carlsbad, New Mexico. Along the way we stopped off to eat breakfast in Junction, TX at Isaack's Restaurant (a place where William always used to stop when traveling with his family to visit his grandparents in Plainview, Texas). Here is a picture of the boys outside Isaacks.



We stayed on night in Carlsbad and visited the caverns. We took a park guided tour of the King's Palace which was really great. After our visit to Carlsbad, we were off to Roswell, NM to go to the International UFO Museum.



After our brief visit to Roswell, we continued our drive to Taos, New Mexico where we stayed four nights at the Inn on the Rio. We spent our days in Taos riding bikes and hiking. We went to the some of the BLM lands near Taos and went to the Colorado River Gorge and also did a 6 mile bike ride. You heard it right - Ethan rode his bike for a whole six miles. We packed our lunch and stopped for a rest and snacks on the way. On another day, we hiked down to a natural spring had lunch and skipped stones in the water. Here is a picture of me and Ethan on one of our biking trips. You can see the bridge that goes over the Colorado River Gorge in the background.



Here is a picture of William and Ethan stopping to enjoy the view.



Here is the trail we hiked down to get to the natural spring where we had our lunch and skipped rocks.



Here is a picture of Ethan throwing a big rock into the river.



We left Taos and headed to Red River, NM where we stayed in a cabin and did more hiking, mountain biking, and rafting. Here is a picture of our cabin.



We had a stocked pond in front of our cabin, so William and Ethan also enjoyed fishing (catch and release).



During our stay in Red River, we took several memorable hikes. William had the brillant idea of bringing Ethan's bike on the hikes (up the mountain to a lake, usually), so that he could ride back down. Ethan was usually able to ride a good bit of the way up, but dad ended up carrying his bike up many times. It always paid off as Ethan loved riding his bike down the mountain. We had one day where we hiked up for 5 hours. Ethan was a real champ - we never made it to lost lake, but we went really high into the mountain - it was beautiful.





Here is a picture of our picnic at Middle Fork lake.


One of the themes of our hikes was rain. We always made it up the trail and had lunch before the daily afternoon rain, but never quite made it back before getting soaking wet. Here are some wet shots of Ethan (two different hikes).




Another exciting thing we did on our trip was a half day guided rafting trip. Ethan had great fun sitting in the front of the raft the entire time. Here are some pictures of our rafting trip. While we were waiting for the rafting to start, Ethan and William played chess with our travel chess set.




We also rode the ski lift at Red River and hiked down and took a side trip to the Indian cliff dwellings at Bandalier National Monument.





We had a wonderful time and would like to go back and do a hiking and camping trip, so we can go on some longer hikes.