And so the trip begins

I have set a personal goal to blog our trip all along the way, in hopes of not falling so far behind as to lose any bits of it. I find this to be a rather significant trip for our family and is worthy of being recorded, don't you think?

As with all good road trips, ours started with a a massive electrical storm. Isn't that how your road trips always start? No? Weird.

We went to bed before 8:00 on Thursday night with the intention of getting up at 2:00 in the morning to start driving. Rather contrary to those plans, though, Chris and I were both woken up around 11:30 by lightning and thunder. Holy cow. The flashes were literally near-constant and lit up our entire bedroom, they were so bright. The thunder was proportionately loud and frequent. Add to that the rain pounding on the swamp cooler's metal air ducts flowing right into our bedroom and maybe you'll have a sense of why we didn't sleep through the storm...

We eventually gave up trying and just got up. We took our time unloading the dishwasher and taking out the last bag of garbage (because it's totally normal to take out your garbage at 1:00 in the morning during an electrical storm) before we woke up the kids. We left a few minutes earlier than we had originally planned, but it also took us significantly longer to get out of town because the weather made it hard to drive (imagine that). In the end, we made it to Salt Lake at the exact same time we had planned in the first place. Sweet.

Amy took the kids to McDonald's while Chris and I had lunch at a "grown-up" restaurant with my parents and Deborah, Bill, and Morgan. Amusingly, it was a New Mexican restaurant--I told them we should get a discount for driving 10 hours from New Mexico to go to their New Mexican restaurant. Sadly, they didn't agree. But I thought it was funny.

Since we had some time to kill between lunch and when we needed to leave to get to Idaho on time, we decided to go to Ikea. Because it totally makes sense to drive half an hour back in the wrong direction.

We bought wedding presents and birthday presents and cups. Ben had a grand old time pushing around Grandma's purse,

and the girls had fun playing with Grandpa on the Jazzie. Good times.

Our first wedding-related item on the itinerary was the Boldt family bbq/wedding open house in Rupert, ID. In all honesty, I was rather tired and grumpy by this point (13 hours in the car to get there can occasionally have that effect) and therefore was not in the mood to take pictures. I did get a shot of the ...not combine ...no tractor ...I don't know what this particular piece of equipment is called and Chris is asleep so I won't ask him at the moment (though I'm sure someone will happily tell me later) but it was quite amusing to watch it try to fit between all the cars lined up along the road for the party. There was a lot of irritation going around, actually, as people hollered around trying to get party guests to move their cars out of the way.

Perhaps it was only funny to me because I was grumpy... EDITED TO ADD: Chris says it's a combine, it's just missing the big piece across the front that was being hauled on a trailer behind.

The other picture I have comes shortly after Ben fell over and got hurt. We had picked up Amy in Salt Lake and brought her to the wedding with us and once she was there, Ben pretty much wanted nothing to do with me. He was all about Amy. Which they both loved, I'm sure.

We rounded out the nice with just one more hour of driving (just one--brings us to fourteen total that day) to get to a motel in Twin Falls. We were staying at the motel that everyone had gotten group reservations for all at the same time. I'll be accountable and say that I could have left and picked somewhere else to spend the night, but I didn't, even though I wasn't overly impressed with the room. It was LOUD every time the cooler turned on or the toilet was flushed and with six people sleeping in one room, the cooler came on a lot and the toilet was flushed a lot. Needless to say, we didn't sleep so amazingly well that night. But at least every room came with its own spider.

The kids all slept on the floor, and that was the only picture worthy thing there.

Except for this one cute picture of Megan, even though you can only kind of see her face.

And, as you might guess, in the fourteen hours of driving that day and the three hours of driving the next day, we had ample opportunity for some car seat shots.

Next up...Ben turns 2!