Great Sand Dunes National Park

This blog is for yesterday because we got home so late.  We got up at about 8 o'clock and headed for the dunes.  We drove through Denver but when we got into the country, it was a lot prettier.  When we got there we had to go into the visitor center and learn how they were formed.  They were formed when the mountains eroded and streams carried the sand into the valley and piled up to make giant sand dunes.  They were about 750 feet high and we planned on climbing to the top.  It looked super easy and not very high but when you got on them, they shifted and it was steep so you had to crawl in a lot of places.  All of us kids ran ahead of the parents and the girls pretended to be super hero's and they'd have me cling onto the sweater that she wasn't wearing and they'd pull me to the top.  That was fine by me because it was hard work.  The sights were beautiful because we were surrounded by mountains that had snow on them and there were tons of dust devils everywhere.  The winds were really strong and could almost knock you off your feet.  It would also carry sand and it would feel like a thousand needles against your skin.  We'd then try to cover up and put our hands over our heads but this would just get sand in our eyes.  For about 5 minutes I was laying on the ground with tons of sand in my eyes with my hands over them, it wasn't fun.  After about 3/4 of the long hike, mom and dad stopped and waited for us while we went to the very top.  I was way in front of the girls the whole time and made it up about 5 minutes before them but they just had to beat me so they went about 5 steps farther to prove something.  I then ran down to where mom and dad were on a big drop off and did a front flip while dad to a picture of me doing it.  When the girls caught up with us dad jumped over the whole drop which was pretty cool and ended up landing on his face.  We all laughed while dad brushed of all of the sand.  We ran down some of it on our way back but ended up doing karaoke down most of it.  We made it down really fast and headed back to the car.  We all had sand in every crevice of our bodies so we went into the changing room to shake out our clothes and everything.  We stopped at a convenient store on our way back because we all had sand in our mouths too.  We wished we had brought a sled or snowboard because a lot of other people did it and it looked like a lot of fun.  It acted just like snow and was better than a normal sledding hill.  We also went up and down barefoot so that made it even more fun.  When we got home we went to bed right away and today we slept in until about 10.