I've been thinking about how this travelogue would be like me calling you over to my house (in the old days) to come and watch our vacation slideshow with us. Thankfully for you, we live in a much more sophisticated world and you have the options of not looking at this at all, picking and choosing what you want to look at, looking at some today, more tomorrow and so on, or you can look at it all! I'm so nice! ;)
If we did more than one thing per day I will sort that out as well, hopefully making this a little easier to read...
Since I probably won't remember this when I'm old I need to specify that my parents and little brother, Logan would be with us the whole week. My older sister, Kami and her roommate, Heather came for the weekend as did my brother from Wyoming, Donovan.
My little brother, Devin is loving life away from home in France. My little sister, Kaeloni thought that Disneyland was a better vacation than Lava Hot Springs. (Psh - what's wrong with her!?!?!) and my older brother Corby and his family just couldn't make it work with their schedule. We missed them all though!
CAN WE GO YET?
Our plan was to be out the door by noon. Well it was a good plan for the most part until we got a call from the fence guy the night before saying he wanted to come by to give us an estimate. That was set up for 10:30 and Eric had to run a few other errands afterwards, but we still thought we could make it by noon. Well the fence guy was here for an hour, but we were okay knowing we'd come home to this:
-- Don't be worried, they actually FINISHED it today. The posts just need a couple weeks to set. --
Eric still had a few other errands to run before we could actually leave. One of which was to bring something home for lunch. Eric kept it simple and we had Little Ceasars. Quick and easy cleanup and we were all ready to get the car packed and we were gone.
ON THE ROAD
We pulled out of the driveway at about 1:15. Only a little after an hour after we had planned. That was okay. I thought it would be perfect timing for the kids and Ailey would take a nap. Well she did fall asleep, but none of the other kids really did. The kids sitting in the back watched movies with the portable DVD player, the kids in the middle used Eric's tablet for games and movies. Eric listened to a book (on earphones, thank goodness) while he drove and I listened to my music.
About 30 or 45 minutes away from our destination, Ailey starts freaking out! Nothing can calm her down. We do our best to try to reassure her and comfort her, but nothing is working. I finally remember that I have Coraline on my phone and she likes to watch that occasionally, so I tried it. It worked!
Then a few kids had to go potty. We knew better than to try to make them hold it. So we found a rest stop and let the kids go to the bathroom. Ailey and Nate were kind of restless, so I got them out for a bit so they could run around and stretch their legs. This seemed to help Ailey as well. We drove the rest of the way in peace.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
We got to our little vacation home around 4:30/5:00. The kids LOVED this place. Eric and I were pretty excited as well. It had a fenced yard and much more living space than the previous homes we've stayed in. I was thrilled to see this:
Yes, it was a purple room and yes, I commandeered it from the kids! I LOVED IT! The few things I disliked about the house were that it was hardwood floors throughout (which is actually nice with kids, I just prefer carpet) and there was no storage in the kitchen.
Eric and I are so glad we found this Lava Lodging website YEARS ago and that we've always been able to acquire a house to stay in. It costs about the same as a hotel room would, but we have space for the kids to run around and no door to door neighbors to worry about. And like I said this year we really lucked out and the kids had a huge yard to play in.
We spent the rest of the night settling in, the kids running around crazy exploring. Eric played his new game all night:
Me? I spent time playing on my new toy:
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