And, were off!

Have you ever heard the parable, "How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time."  How do you undertake a 5,000 mile road trip?  One chunk at a time.  As of Friday, we are 860 miles in to our trip.

Thursday began like any other school day.  Seminary, exercise, accompany the kids to school, make dinner... but after dinner is where the day divereged from the norm.  We loaded up in the van and began our trip. 

Two hours before we left, this showed up....

6 TONS of rocks

Poor Dode, aparently it's not enough for him to go to work each day to support our family while I go on vacation, he must move 6 tons of rock, one backbreaking shovel ful at a time, in an effort to make our septic tank work better.

Details of the trip:
We arrived at a rest stop in Couer d'Alene Idaho around 11:00 pm where we slept in the car.  After everyone was asleep, William used the long reach of his arms and feet to snag my purse.  He ransaked it, ripping things, opening things, smearing lotion far and wide.  Not content to just destroy my things, he got ahold of Jacob's backpack and proceeded to eat the treats Jacob purchased that morning at his seminary auction.  It was a great start to the day!  Two hours in to our drive Friday, Miriam threw up all over herself. 

We arrived in Billings, Montana at 3:30 local time (2:30 our time).  We spent 800 miles driving in the rain.  I'd read in the news before we left that we were having unseasonally cold weather due to a rainstorm that stretched from Boise, ID to Vietnam.  I think we were driving in that storm.  Within 45 minutes, the storm had caught up with us and it rained steadily the remainder of the day.

We stayed at Billings Clubhouse Inn which had a pool (a must) and would accomodate us all in one room, hooray!  The pool area was nice, the hot tub felt wonderful for my stiff muscles, and the breakfast was par for a hotel, waffles, breads, cereal.  

I'm a Western Washington girl through and through but there is something about the wide open spaces of Montana with the subtle scent of wild sage that just seem to expand my soul.  I wish I didn't have to drive so far to experience it!

June 4th is Isaac's birthday so instead of picnic lunching, we stopped at McDonalds, his choice.  Each of the kids stepped up to the counter one at a time and placed their order, all with modifications.  When we got our food, of course the order was messed up.  Instead of getting 9 McChickens, we got two, with all the modifications to those two.  So, back in line to buy more food.  I hope that is our first and last fast food stop this trip, or if we go again everyone just gets them the way they come.

For dinner, we ate at Mckenzie River Pizza Co, which I found at Trip Advisor.  The restaurant was done in a wilderness theme and they seated us right away, yay!  We got three pizzas:  cheese, pepperoni, and 1/2 BBQ pulled pork, 1/2 spicy Hawaiian.  Their large pizzas sure didn't seem very large compared to the pizzas I make!  I though we'd have lots of left overs but Elizabeth and Miriam were able to pretty much finish off the cheese with just the two of them. 

After pizza, we stopped at a small ice cream shop called Softies which is a paradise of soft serve creations.  They had at least 10 different kinds of dip for the soft serve.  They also had flavor syrups they dripped on the sides, 20 different blizzards made with soft serve, and their prices were great! $1.50 for a cone bigger than I could eat.  I got chocolate with chocolate peanut butter dip.  Anastaya got the best, vanilla with toasted coconut dip.  Miriam enjoyed splashing in the puddles in the parking lot.  Although it's raining like crazy, it's also warm out, something we don't experience in Western Washington very often.

Meanwhile, back in Arlington, Dode took an eight hour test that cost over $1000 and if passed, which his boss tells him he MUST, will certify him by the federal government to survey on indian land.

I am pretty wiped out by the two days of driving on limited sleep.  I went out to get some things from the trailer.  Aparently it doesn't rain much in Billings because there were no storm drains in the parking lot.  There was at least four inches of water all around the trailer that I had to wade into while trying to unlock it.  Because of my lack of brain power, a few hours earlier I'd misplaced the padlock so I locked the door while walking around the rainy parking lot looking for it.  I found it in the van!  Well, I'd needed to unlock those locks when I got in.  I had three locks to open, the padlock and two on the trailer door.  All while feeling the water in the puddle soak into my shoes.  Once I was done getting what I needed out of the trailer and had carefully put everything back, I could not find my keys anywhere.  I searched through everything over and over, taking out everything I'd touched and carefully searching for the keys.  The padlock was sitting there on the floor staring at me and obviously I'd needed the keys to open it but I could not find them anywhere.  After a half hour, I finally decided to use my spare keys to lock things up and have another go at the keys once I was rested.  I waded back out into the pond and closed the door.  Grrr!  There were the keys, hanging from the lock in the door.  It's definately time to rest this brain!

Saturday, we're stopping at Stella's for cinnamon rolls on our way out of town. Then, it's off to Custer State Park.