A Park City Family Reunion With Kids (And the Flight Delay We’re Still Talking About)
We landed in Salt Lake City at 3am.
Not because we wanted an adventure. Because a storm parked itself over Dallas, American Airlines issued a ground stop, and our flight sat for twelve hours before it finally took off. When my husband asked what they were going to do about two toddlers now arriving in the middle of the night, the answer was essentially “you got there, didn’t you.” Cool. Great system. I will not be trying American Airlines again anytime soon.
I don’t usually write about the trips that go sideways. But this one is worth it, because a Park City family reunion with kids, thirteen of us, more than made up for a rough start. Here’s how the rest of it went.
Back at Greyhawk, Rolling Thirteen Deep
We stayed in the same Greyhawk area we’ve booked before, which by now feels like our Park City home base. This time it wasn’t just us. My brother-in-law, his wife, and my husband’s parents all rolled in too, three generations for a week. Between us, we had seven kids ranging from a first birthday to age ten, and adults into their 80s … thirteen people total spread across a mountain town in June.
There’s something different about a multigenerational trip versus a regular vacation. Nobody’s trying to hit every activity on a list. You’re just orbiting each other, showing up for meals, letting the cousins disappear into their own pack. Greyhawk’s proximity to everything we actually wanted- the lake, the trails, old town- made that kind of loose, unstructured togetherness easy instead of a logistics project.
Be warned, the terrain of Park City is not for the weak: lots of walking, hills, and stairs. Our adjacent Airbnb actually had 2 rooms on the entrance floor, a second floor with a kitchen & living room, and a third floor with a master suite. This is different than our usual spot.
Mornings at the DV Cafe
Our mornings had a rhythm. Breakfast at DV Cafe, then straight down to the little beach at the lake so the kids could dig in the sand and wade around while the coffee kicked in. It’s an easy walk from the Greyhawk condos, which is exactly why we keep coming back to this spot.
Watching a pack of cousins run themselves ragged on a lake beach before 9am is its own kind of chaos, but it’s the good kind. Everyone’s tired by nap time. Everyone sleeps.
The Hike That Humbled Me
We hiked the Silver Lake Trail up near the Stein Eriksen and rode the chairlift back down, which is the smartest way to do it and also somehow still not enough of a shortcut. I want to be honest with you: it kicked my butt. I did this same hike ten years ago and remember it being just as difficult. I have no idea why I assumed a decade, two pregnancies, and two small kids later I’d be somehow more fit. I was not. The view from the top was worth every bit of the burn, but I will be lying down for a moment before I try that one again.
World Cup Fever on the Lawn
This trip happened to line up with World Cup season, and the cousins picked up on it immediately. Every patch of grass in Park City became a soccer field. With seven kids spanning a first birthday to age ten, you’d think a real game would be impossible, but somehow the eight-year-old organized everyone, the middle crew actually played, and the baby had live entertainment. Before breakfast, after dinner, mid-conversation with an aunt they hadn’t seen in six months, someone would produce a ball, and that was that. It turned out to be the easiest form of entertainment we didn’t plan for, six cousins running off energy while the adults actually got to finish a sentence for once.
Somehow, Fletcher’s Sat All of Us
We made a reservation at Fletcher’s for the full group, all thirteen of us, and I genuinely don’t know how that happened without weeks of planning. But it did, and it turned into one of the best nights of the trip. There’s something about a table that big, that full of people who actually like each other, that no five-star tasting menu can compete with (although the kids’ menu steak is top-notch culinary).
Watching Real Ski Jumpers in June
One of the more unexpected moments of the trip was stopping by the Utah Olympic Park on a whim. There’s no posted schedule for training runs other than the Saturday show, so we had no idea if anyone would actually be jumping. We got lucky. Athletes were up there practicing, launching off a ramp built into a mountain hillside in the middle of summer, no snow anywhere in sight. The kids stood there completely silent, which, if you have small children, you know is basically a miracle.
We’ve still never toured the full Olympic Park facilities, and apparently you can actually ride the bobsled track there. That’s unofficially on the list for next time. * picturing the Colin Jost viral video during Milan Cortina Olympics this past February, he thought his bones were going to fly off his body *
Would We Do This Again?
Yes. Immediately. The flight was a mess and I stand by never flying American through a Dallas storm with toddlers again if I can help it. But a Park City family reunion with kids, thirteen of us, hiking, lake mornings, an impossible Fletcher’s reservation, and a soccer ball that never stopped moving, is exactly the kind of trip that makes the twelve-hour delay worth forgetting about.
Have you ever tried to wrangle a big multigenerational trip like this? I want to hear how you pulled it off, or didn’t.
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