July??? Where did it go???


Mike called from work and asked me what I would think if we left for our Utah vacation early...I asked just how early I was talking about. He said like Sunday or Monday, instead of Thursday. I was completely for the idea as soon as he asked. However...soon enough, I realized just how much more work I had to do to get ready. In the long run, all the stress and everything was worth it! We didn't tell anybody, not even the girls knew! We did tell my friend Randie that we would be leaving early for emergency reasons.

We decided not to leave Sunday after church, but to use it to get a good sleep before we headed out Monday morning the 8th. We woke the girls up nice and early. and told them to change quickly and get in the car, that we had something important to do. (We packed the car Sunday night after the girls were in bed.)

The house wasn't as "spotless" as I'd have liked, but it was clean enough to come home to. :D Once the girls were in the car, they had nothing but questions for us. None of which I answered except with a smile! Marley caught on just before we said the "travel" prayer. She was also the one asking why we were packing when it wasn't even close to Thursday yet. I just kept saying, "It'll be here before you know it, and I want to be ready!"



We said our travel prayer and headed over to put gas in the car, and get breakfast because I didn't want to worry about dishes before we left. We were on the freeway by 8:00 that morning. I must say traveling in the van was definitely more comfortable than our little red "Squishy." It seemed to me that we made a lot more stops this time, but it didn't really seem to slow us down either! We bought a Yakima storage box for the top of the van so we didn't have stuff packed up the back window, and can I just say...That was the best thing EVER!!!! It allowed us to pack all our food in a cooler with easy access. When we stopped we could get to the snacks, and lunch food easily.

Along the way, I'd get Instant Messages from family asking me if we were excited to come out, and that they couldn't wait until that weekend when we'd finally be there.



I would just laugh and then say I know, I can't wait either, or I know, I just have to get past all this cleaning and packing! It's so easy to be sneaky when you Instant Message! hee hee hee :D

The trip out went SO fast...Mike insisted on driving, I had no problems!!! We were in St. Louis by the 8 hr. mark, and about Grand Island by the 12 hr. mark. We slept for a few hours in Lincoln, and then drove some more. We remembered places we'd stopped on previous trips to Utah. We stopped little places here and there to catch a rest, or eat our lunch. But knowing how close we were, just made it harder to stop any longer than a few minutes.

Mike and I have a tendency to like to just show up on the front porch of family members! We like to keep family guessing! ;)


The closer we got, the more he and I schemed about what we could do...We decided that because my parents were at work, and his parents were at work, and the other siblings...well...we didn't know where most of them lived, and we didn't want to ruin it by asking, so we went to the one that we figured would most likely be home...Mike's sister Michele. Can I just say again...just how much fun it was to see her surprise!!! Mike called her and was talking to her as we pulled up in her driveway. When we rang her doorbell, she told us to hold on because there was somebody at the door...Oh my gosh...I thought for sure, our under the breath laughing, or my noisy kids were going to give us away ...but they didn't, and we could tell we had succeeded in our little surprise scheme!!! While we were there Mike's mom called Michele, and we had to make sure Michele didn't spill the beans because we hadn't been there yet. We visited with Michele and the boys for a few minutes. Tanner wasn't sure what was going on, just that all of a sudden there were girls everywhere, and it got really loud with excitement. We went from there to Mike's mom's house, and surprised his parents there. It was fun to see everybody's reactions when we surprised them. We unloaded the some of our stuff and then headed over to my parent's house.


We surprised both my parents to tears. While we were there, we gave them a blanket that we had made for them. I had text messaged my sister Debbie to ask her when she was going to be at mom's house because "I needed her to do something." She was busy doing something and couldn't make it there so we took a picture of us giving them the blanket, and sent it to her...
It took here a few minutes to realize we were at mom and dad's house. You could practically hear her screaming through the text message. We gave Mike's parents an identical blanket also.
Well, This post brings us to Utah, and well, we just did too much while in Utah to put it all here...so, I'[ll have a few different posts highlighting things we did, and some of the people we saw.