This weekend we decided to take a family trip to Ruidoso, New Mexico for a much needed getaway. We stayed at the Quality Inn and got a King suite (which was AMAZING for the kids) and it had free breakfast and an indoor pool. I wasn’t so sure how staying in a hotel with all of the boys was going to be, but it was best case scenario (and I loved that there was only 1 door they could leave the room from!!). We started our adventure at Fox Cave by mining a bag of gems for $10 and buying wooden sling shots and then headed to Bonita Lake to hike around for an hour or two. After we had worked up an appetite we bought tickets to the Flying J Ranch where we mined for gold, shot pistols, had pony rides, watched a gunfight and ate BBQ! This place was magical for the kids!

The second morning it was supposed to rain in Ruidoso and so we made plans to drive 70 miles to White Sands National Monument for a few hours. I had never been there before and was so excited to see a place like that! It was HOT and we only found relief by burying each other in the cooler sand a few inches below the surface. The boys loved it, but our stay there only lasted an hour due to the radiant heat! We waited out the rain at Farley’s restaurant and then drove up to Skip Apache to hike and ended up going about a mile down the trail and ran into two elk and some bear poop! We played in the creek near the parking lot and headed back to the hotel for candy and Paw Patrol before everyone crashed out again for the night.

Our last morning we went to Big Bonito trail and hiked a mile or so until we found a cliff with a steep trail down to some pools in the river. We let the boys swim for an hour in the river and then drove home. It was such a wonderful trip and gave the boys a place to wear themselves out run for miles- that is our favorite kind of vacation!