Summer Vacation '14, Part 1: Driving to Utah

After living on the East Coast for 7 years, Chicago feels SO CLOSE to Utah that we decided this year we'd just drive there.  No big deal, right?  We're a road-tripping family, and it's only a two-day drive to get there.  So, we all piled in to the van; Ellis and Sam in the back where the DVD player is, Henry in the middle as the go-between-man, and Jenn and me up front.

It didn't take long before Ellis was pretending to smoke like a Newsie and Sam had his shirt off.  A little boredom is good for a kid, right?  And, Jenn was prepared for this: Each boy had his own clipboard, complete with worksheets, stickers, and the license-plate game (by the end of the trip, we had every state but Arkansas!).  And, we had Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to listen to, along with many DVDs.  

We didn't stop much along the way, but you can't drive through Iowa and not see Uncle Jacob.  He showed us around Iowa City, which turned out to be a really cool town.  

Other highlights of the drive included seeing Mater in our hotel parking lot in Ogallala, NE...

... and a cool rest stop just outside of Laramie, WY at the highest point along the old Lincoln Highway route (which runs from SF to NY).  Is this Henry's criminal face, or I've-been-in-the-car-for-1200-miles face?  You make the call.

The drive was uneventful, and actually quite fun most of the way.  Then, about 30 miles from the Utah border, they decided it would be fun to close the freeway.  Like, close it down completely.  Suddenly, instead of being just over an hour from Layton, we were 3.5 hours away, as they diverted us onto small, twisty highways.  At the end of a 22 hour drive, that's a real bummer.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and we broke out Hedbanz to keep our minds off our woes.  Here I am being ice cream.

But this is what is was all about: Utah heat, Otter Pops, and play time with the cousins.  Totally worth any drive.

This year, Jenn's parents had a new slip 'n slide made out of an old billboard.  It was epic.

For some reason, Sam got on a weapon kick right when we arrived.  Here he is with his two favorite weapons: his gun, and blue nigh-night.  If his gun doesn't get you, he can whip that blanket pretty good!

As if the slip 'n slide wasn't enough, the next day Jenn and the boys went to Cherry Hill for even more water action.  (I got to work both of these days, actually.  Lucky me.)

Evenings we did what we always do: ate amazing food and played games, mostly outside.  Here I am dominating at Dirty Hearts.

Somehow we failed to arrange our schedules so that we could hang out with Tanner and Meagan very much.  So, we had to visit Tanner at work at Great Harvest Bread in Ogden.  He's a model employee, as you can see.

While in downtown Ogden, we found a U.S. Presidents horse, a Newsie horse, and a few other horses that called our names.

At the requisite Cafe Rio stop, we put all of the boys on their own table so that the adults could talk at our table.  I bet more than a few customers wondered who the heck those kids were and how they had gotten to Cafe Rio without parent supervision.

We made it 1,400 miles across the middle of America, only to have a flat tire along I-15 on our way down to Sandy.  It was a good time to teach Henry how to change a tire, and we all learned a lesson about how hot it can feel when you're straining at lug nuts while standing on black asphalt in 98 degree heat.  Ugh.