Disney's The Little Mermaid, the Musical

June 22, 2011

April, Kirsten, Ollie, Lily, Charlotte, Kendall, and Gage took off for St. George around noon to shop at the outlet stores, grab some lunch, and play at the water park. Collin, the kids, and I stayed home and cleaned cabin. April offered to pay the kids $10 each to do a list of chores. Afterwards we let them play in the water park:

Hidden Valley Park

3505 South Barcelona Dr.

St. George, UT

Their baby cousins were running around naked while they wore bathing suits. They all thought it was really funny when they sat on top of the water spouts. 

We dried them off and went to:

Chuck-O-Rama

127 Red Cliffs Drive

St. George, UT 84790

(801) 637-4464

 chuck-o-rama.com

Chuck-O-Rama is  a great restaurant to take a big crowd, especially if you like fried food and meat. There were also some healthy options like salad and fruit, but most of it was comfort food. The rolls and fried scones were really yeasty and soft. The salad bar had regular salad stuff and then some mayonaisey salads with pasta or potatoes. There was a meat board with roast ham and turkey. You could get scalloped potatoes, kielbasa, Jell-O, cinnamon pull-apart bread, baked beans, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, sweet and sour chicken, cornbread, etc., The dessert bar had soft serve frozen yogurt with toppings, pumpkin roll, brownies, black forest cake, berry topped white cake, rice pudding, bread pudding, peach cobbler, apple crisp, yellow cake with raspberries topping, and rocky road cake. The rocky road cake was my favorite dessert. It was served warm so the marshmallows with nice and gooey and the cake was dense and moist.

I wouldn’t normally choose a greasy, all-you-can-eat buffet, but it was perfect for our group of 6 adults and 12 kids. Everyone found something they could eat and the buffet price goes by age. It was a little chaotic to be constantly getting up to fill plates and get drinks and wipe gooey faces.

Our next stop was:

Tuacahn Ampitheater and Center for the Arts

1100 Tuacahn Drive

Ivins, UT 84738

(435) 652-3200

www.tuacahn.org

to see the Disney’s the Little Mermaid, the Musical. The setting was absolutely gorgeous with the red rock cliff wall behind the stage and a waterfall flowing behind it. At the beginning of the play, the waterfall flowed onto the stage and flooded it as Prince Eric’s ship came into view.  All the actors that were supposed to be sea creatures were wearing metal Heely’s to make it look as if they were gliding through the water. All the mermaids had tails from below their waists down to their bottoms and sticking out behind them. They had black skirts on to cover their legs. Scuttle flew across the stage by way of wires and crashed into a cliff face, the stage crew fired a feather cannon onto the stage. Flotsam and Jestsam were my favorite characters. The eels had lights on their arms and tails. Some extra eels glided onto the flooded stage on longboards.

There were a few changes to the story that deviated from the 1989 movie version. Ariel got her beautiful voice from her dead mother who was killed by Ursula who is King Triton’s sister. When Poesidon died, he gave his trident to his son, Triton, and his magic shell to his daughter, Ursula. Also, when they killed Ursula, there wasn’t this great battle, Ariel just stole the trident from her and stabbed her and threw her magic shell in a hole. When Ariel is on land and mute, she can sing out her thoughts if no one else is around. There were a lot new songs, most of which I liked.

They used some kind of cool effects. There was a rain curtain that they projected images onto like a rolling surf or bubbles. They set off fire works after the show and used some fireworks to symbolize lightening striking the mast of the ship. Ursula was on some sort of scooter or peddled device on wheels.

My favorite line from the play was when King Triton said, “As long as you live under my reef, you’ll follow my rules!”

Eric didn’t look anything like the Eric in the movie and he was not really leading man material in the looks department. He was a good actor and had a great singing voice. When he first started singing, Emma leaned over and whispered, “No offense to anyone, but I think Prince Eric is pretty UGLY.”

There was a part when Ariel and her father were hugging and saying goodbye to each other. Emma started crying (and so did I).

Ride 'em, Muleboy

June 21, 2011

We farted around the cabin this morning a little and then went to Bryce Canyon. We went to the visitor’s center and watched a movie about Bryce Canyon. Usually, the entrance fee to the national park is $25, but since the first day of summer, we got in free! John very generously paid for us to take a 2-hour mule ride into Bryce Canyon. 

Canyon Trail Rides

(435) 679-8665

www.canyonrides.com/bryce_canyon_rides.html

You could only go on the mule ride if you were 7-years-old or over and weighed 220 pounds or less. Each rider cost $50 to ride. The younger kids who couldn’t go on the ride were pretty upset, especially Charlotte. She screamed for a long time without ceasing because she wanted to ride the horsies so much. April, John, Kirsten, Gage, Lily, and Charlotte went to a couple of the lookouts and hike around a bit while they waited for us.

The rest of us saddled up on mules chosen for us by the cowboys. Collin remarked that he was surprised that there are still real live cowboys in the world today.

Ian’s mule was named Alice. She was 30 years old. Ian felt thirsty the whole time, but the ride was still awesome. His mule was led by our guide, Cole, for the entire ride.

Aidan said he almost died four times while the horse was trying to eat weeds on the edge of the cliff. His mule’s name was Lisa. She was very stubborn. Whenever a fly landed on her back she would shake it off and it was really creepy, he thought she was in shock or something. She stopped to eat about 10 times. Aidan doesn’t think they feed the mules very well because why would they be trying to eat if they had been fed well.

Ollie’s mule was named Sir Henry. He kept saying he wished he had his iPod touch and a bed. He and Aidan kept grabbing pine needles from the trees they passed and throwing them in the air.

Kendall’s mule’s name was Winchester. First she was scared then she liked it. She felt a little calmer and trusted her horse. Kendall didn’t exactly trust her horse and she felt a bit too high. Then she felt a lot better.

Emma claimed to be a born mulewoman. She said she had been horseback riding twice (I have no recollection of her ever riding). Her horse was named Priscilla and she was pretty gentle. She almost fell off a cliff, so that was pretty scary. But after a few minutes it felt like she went horseback riding every day. Priscilla was very disagreeable because she was a teenager. Emma got really scared because they’re trained to go really close to the edge of the cliff so it was pretty freaky, but she felt better after our guide, Cole, assured us that they wouldn’t drag us off the cliff.

Collin’s mule was named Dixie. He loved the views and asked our guide Cole a lot of questions. It made him want to be a cowboy until his bum started hurting.

I loved the mule ride through Bryce Canyon. I took tons of pictures, but didn’t turn my shutter speed up high enough and so some of my pictures turned out blurry. My mule, Keystone, was a big time snacker and constantly took me to the edge of the path to stretch his neck out and grab some weeds and scare the heck out of me. I felt pretty comfortable on my mule and it did follow directions if I showed him who was boss. After about an hour, my bum knee really started to hurt. We also all got a little sunburned in spite of wearing SPF 50. Some of the cool formations we saw were a hollowed out section called the naked lady of Bryce Canyon, the Queens’ Garden, Sinking Ship, Wall of Windows, and hoodoos that looked like ancient cities as far as the eye can see.  We also saw a large area in the canyon that had tons of trees that had been struck by lightening, all in the same spot. It was awesome! I can totally see why my derby wife loves horseback riding.

Cole said that he was giving us a cowboy souvenir, the soreness in our bodies for the next couple of days. One of the other guides called one of the slopes on the switchback where all the mules would stop to pee and poop “Perfume Point.” Our guide made a joke that they had been asked to prop up one of the falling rocks and as we passed by, we saw a tiny stick almost bent in half.

I was really surprised that kids as young as 7-years-old and people who had never been on a horse were allowed to go on a 2-hour ride on really steep switchbacks on a bunch of stubborn mules.

After the mule ride, we went to one of the lookouts, Bryce Point. Most of the people there were foreign. There was one guy who was riding his bike all around Bryce Canyon. He was sweaty.

We stopped for some ice cream at

Prairie Dog Gifts

Ruby's Inn

26 South Main

Bryce Canyon City, UT 84764

1(866) 866-6616 

www.rubsinn.com/old-bryce-town.html

 and to look around the shops in Brian Head that all had false fronts. I had huckleberry ice cream. There was a really cool statue of an Indian Chief with feather shaped lollipops in his head dress.

For dinner, we had pizza at:

Pizanos Pizzeria

259 South State Highway

143 Brian Head, UT 84719-8001

(435) 677-3341

pizanospizzeria.com

 The pizza was awesome, but one of the owners was really rude and asked us to do take out instead because they were doing construction. His wife was really nice and made sure we had everything we needed. We ordered 2 large pepperoni pizzas for the kids  and John, and they ate all but two pieces. For the rest of us, we ordered a veggie pizza with olives, artichoke hearts, bell peppers, fresh tomatoes, spinach, and red onions. The crust was really crisp on the bottom and chewy on top, just how I like it.