Fun Things to Do in St. George

 I'm finally catching up on blogging after some whirlwind travel. During fall break, we spent several days in St. George. We wanted to go someplace close and warm, and I knew there would be no shortage of things to do. We visited a new park, Thunder Junction, which has a dinosaur and train theme. Here's Desert Girl getting rocked as she pretends to be a baby dinosaur.

And then the kids got their shower.

The train is 1/4 size of the original and runs on a track around the playground. It costs $1 to ride the train, and the engineer and conductor were super nice!

The train can hold a lot of people, but we were the only ones for our ride!

The train even goes through a tunnel that I tried to convince the kids was from Dinosaur Train. They didn't quite believe me.


Also at the playground was a sensory park with musical instruments. It was really cool and there was always someone there playing music.

The next day we hopped on our bikes to take the bike trail to the Johnson Farm Dinosaur Tracks Museum. Along the way we spotted a snail and stopped to get a closer look.

We're not used to seeing snails, so we had a good, long look! Then we saw several more snails. They seemed to like the riparian area, and as the trail went right along the Virgin River, there were lots.

The bike trail doesn't lead right to the museum (yet--hopefully it will in the future!), so we had some route finding to do, but we eventually made it to find the amazing dinosaur tracks there.

Our future paleontologist wasn't so thrilled. She much prefers to dig than just see things displayed.

We went for a foodie lunch at the Twisted Noodle Cafe. Desert Girl particularly liked the chocolate mint mousse. Hmmm, go figure!

We saw a tarantula near the Santa Clara River Reserve, but we decided not to hike there due to some impending rain.

Desert Boy had asked repeatedly to go the trampoline park. So we went, and it was underwhelming and the kids got trampoline burns and they may have it out of their system.

What was much more fun was Pioneer Park, on the north side of St. George. This is a park without any playground equipment. Instead, there are rocks to climb!

There's not much official climbing, you can just scamper whereever you want.

Plus we found a good squeeze.

It was so much fun we went back to it again a couple days later and found new places to explore.

Another excursion was to Staheli Farms. My husband had joined us by this time so we took a family photo in the big rocking chair.

And here's my brother with the kids.

The kids loved doing the little activities, like milking the cow...

...and playing with the pumps...

...and going through the corn maze. Okay, I loved the corn maze too. I wandered off on my own and it was so quiet. I may have stayed lost for a little longer than necessary! :)

From there we headed out to Warner Valley to see some dinosaur tracks. When we got to the trailhead, we saw we weren't alone.

We took the short trail into the wash where we found the trackway, some of it protected with a water diversion.

It wasn't hard to spot the tracks.

We had a lot of fun imagining the dinosaurs walking here.

An interpretive sign gave us some more info and also showed a map where we could find more tracks.

It's so cool to think that these tracks have been preserved for millions of years!

Dinosaur track vs Desert Girl's foot. She's got a ways to grow.

Back to a couple other things I like about St. George. Their trail system is marvelous! And now they've added a bike fixing station! You can pump up your tires or use one of the tools to adjust your bike.

And they've added signs that tell you how far things are and how long it will take you to bike or walk there.

Kiosks along the way have maps. It is so well thought out and done. We're trying to get trails in our community, so I was taking notes!

It was so great to have Uncle Ed with us on our adventures. We still have one more post of our fall break adventures--an all day hike in Snow Canyon State Park.