Sunday, June 02, 2013

Road Trip Day 2: Iowa and Illinois

I've got snoring children sprawled out around me as I sit here in a corner of a hotel room, capturing a little of our day before I get to sleep so I can wake up early for the Chicago Retreat tomorrow morning.

The kids ate themselves silly at the free breakfast buffet at the hotel this morning in Kearney, NE then we spent another whole day driving. The points system Ashton kindly described in the last post held up nicely plus we had church in the car  - everyone picked a story to read aloud from the Friend magazine and we had good discussions about honesty, standing up for what we know in our hearts is right, and other good stuff I can't remember right now. We'd hoped to find a church to go to but our time was super tight because we'd hit so much construction yesterday and we had to get to Chicago...

Observations on Iowa: lots more towns and hills than Nebraska, very green, fields of newly planted crops everywhere, lots of trees and rivers, lots of windmills and a ton of silos. Slower speed limit than Nebraska ): (Iowa was 70, Nebraska and Wyoming were 75)


Observations on Illinois: even more towns, less open space, still very green, bigger wider freeways (with even lower speed limits...) 55-65. Beautiful storm rolling in - but it never actually rained. Great clouds and skies this whole trip.

Random statistics for today:

  • Saw 2 burning buildings - a large building and a small house in two different places along the freeway, flames roaring, black smoke like crazy
  • Saw about a hundred windmills
  • Saw about a thousand grain silos
  • Kids had about 25 annoying little disputes about things like Ashton putting his feet up on the seat in front of him, Isaac singing, Eliza making tapping noises, whose turn it was to sit where in the car, who wasn't putting their seatbelt on when they were supposed to.... But those moments passed pretty quickly. Truly, these kids have been very good so far. Until bedtime tonight when they were taking forever to give up and fall asleep and I was really really needing to be done for the day...

2 comments:

Camile said...

I'm going to really enjoy following these road trip posts! We moved from Utah to Connecticut last summer and saw a lot of the things you have mentioned - I especially remember all the windmills! Good luck with doing this single-handedly and I hope your retreats are a blast. (I was hoping to go to the one in Boston - but couldn't get it to work out.)

Linda said...

What a good mom! Those little squabbles are inevitable but in the end part of the fun. i took notes once on a long trip in the old fan. There were about a hundred crisis. The only one I can remember is "Josh is sitting on my head!"

Keep on keepin' on!

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