Road-trip Day 21 - Muffins, BBQ, and the fun Hickman Bridge Trail at Capitol Reef National Park

The morning of day 21 arrived a little earlier than desired due to the kids waking up early…but it came with an exciting treat – we got muffins from the muffin man! (Yes, we definitely sang “Do you know the muffin man? a few times”) When we were doing RV park reviews we read that campers could order yummy muffins every morning. So of course when we checked in last night, we ordered muffins…and this morning we quickly devoured 4 of them – a banana coconut (surprisingly the best one), two blueberry, and an apple cinnamon (because Kenzie has recently fallen in love with cinnamon). They were soooo good! Tonight we will order 7 for tomorrow morning 🙂

The activity for this morning is to hike the 1.8 mile long Hickman Bridge Trail to the (you guessed it) Hickman Bridge, a 133-foot natural rock bridge. (There is a really cool rock arch called Cassidy Arch in Capitol Reef that you can hike to and actually walk across. It looked awesome, but apparently there are dangerous rail-less ledges not suitable for kids, so we’ll have to save this for our next trip. Darn.) We packed up, drove 15 minutes to the trail-head, parked, geared up (which takes forever! since it includes packing up a ton of supplies for little kids and dancing the sunscreen tango with kids who don’t want to do such a dance), and loaded the kids in the backpacks.

The trail started off along a pretty creek (although dirty from the rain), rose up the side of a rock face via switch backs, and then eventually turned in to a canyon for the rest of the way. The first leg of the hike was challengingly steep, totally exposed to the sun, and hotter than expected, making us work hard from the start…my kind of hike 🙂 There were beautiful views along the way and a great diversity of rock structures. The rock colors here are different than Arches and Canyonlands. There is the standard red rock but there is also white/tan rocks and even black rocks. The layers of the rock structures neatly change colors to give a cool layered look. We made it to the bridge and let the kids out for some rock climbing, exploring, and a snack break. Unfortunately, once Caleb is out of the backpack, he doesn’t like to go back in. (Quick tangent – this is very true about Caleb and his car seat these days, ugh! We’ve had some epic car seat fights during the trip. It’s exhausting and defeating getting him in his car seat multiple times each day as we drive around. It’s one of the hard things about taking a 1 1/2 year old on this sort of a trip. While this trip has been unbelievably amazing overall for so many reasons, there are challenges and we’ve had some hard moments (real talk)! It’s totally worth it but we don’t want to give the false internet impression that everything is perfect with beautiful pictures and fun stories. Now back to the hike…) We eventually got (er, forced) Caleb into the hiking backpack against his wishes and took off. Thankfully Alicia is amazing at calming kids down, often with fictional voices 😁 This time it was her most famous British “mummy” voice that converted Caleb into a peaceful rider. And so we were all able to hike the rest of the way back with peace and joy and singing!

After the hike we had a quick lunch in the RV and drove around the park so the kids could fall asleep and take naps. Our kids haven’t been car seat sleepers throughout their lives, but spending a month on the road in an RV has given them a lot of practice and totally transformed them, thank the Lord.

For dinner we went to Torrey Grill & BBQ, conveniently located on the property of our RV park. (On site muffins and barbeque!!! Talk about an awesome campground!) The food and friendly service was amazing! The chef recently went on an American BBQ tour and he knew what he was doing. So good! What a great day!