Yellowstone Trip: The Beginning

Our trip for this summer was to Yellowstone. We left on the kids very first day off school and were gone for a week. This day, of course was a driving day. It should have taken us about 6-7 hours to get to our destination. It took us 10 hours! That's ok, though. We made some fun stops along the way.

Here are the kids all ready to go!
They were a little wild to start. Thank goodness it was not an indicator of the entire drive!

Our first stop was to drop off Max. Jeremy's aunt Chris volunteered to watch him for us for the week. That was so nice of her! We greatly appreciated it. She has 3 dogs of her own, 2 yorkies and a chihuahua and she was looking forward to having our new little puppy in the mix. She didn't want to get her picture taken, so she is lacking the smile.

Alexandra's cute hairdo lasted a couple of hours, and then she got bored in the car and pulled it all out.

Our second stop was to visit Autumn my good friend and roommate from Rick's. Our kids played together and we had a really fun visit. I haven't seen Autumn in years so it was great to catch up! I didn't want to leave yet, but Jeremy said we needed to hit the road, so we only ended up staying at Autumns for about 1 1/2 hours.

Next stop, Rexburg!! I was really looking forward to this stop as well. It's been about 10 years since I've been to Rexburg. I forgot they even have a temple there! We spent some time driving around looking at the college and at the old apartment buildings where I used to live. It really hasn't changed as much as I'd heard it had and I still recognized the area quite well. Driving by the campus brought back a lot of great memories! A big to-do on our list was to eat at Craigo's pizza. It wasn't disappointing. The pizza was SO GOOD! Well, there was one disappointment - they don't make the super tasty breadsticks the way they used to. We settled for what they make now, which was still good, just not the same.

Samantha asked a nice girl sitting in the next booth over to take our picture. :)

After dinner we took a quick detour to see the new temple. It was so tall and very pretty. It is on the hill overlooking the city. We were all dressed for Utah weather and were really cold up on that hill. It was just starting to rain so we took a quick picture and ran for the car.

It's very pretty even with the looming clouds behind it.

After stopping at the temple, we really were on the road to our final destination - West Yellowstone! We drove for another 2 hours and finally made it. As usual, I took a few quick pictures of our room before we messed it all up.

Here is the kitchen.

The kids are relaxing in the living room (this was right before I told them to get up and get moving so we could get all our stuff where it needed to be).

I'm in the hall taking this picture towards the front door and kitchen. Jeremy was busy unloading all the luggage.

This is the 2nd bedroom. Nathan slept on one of the beds and Alexandra slept in her playpen that we set up in the closet. Athena and Samantha slept on the murphy bed that pulls down from a closet in the living room.

Here is the master bedroom. We had a 2nd tv in this room and it was really small. The sound wasn't coming through on it right - it was fuzzy and we couldn't control the volume. Then on day 2 of our stay, Jeremy decided to play with the cables in the back that hook everything up and he fixed the problem! Someone had hooked it up wrong! I wonder how many guests were bugged about that before us.

This is the master bath. I forgot to get a picture of the 2nd bath, but it looked really similar to the master bathroom, just a little smaller.

After we got our stuff unpacked, we took the kids down to the indoor pool for 1/2 hour before it closed. I was going to swim, but didn't because I found that the chemicals in the pool room really messed with my eyes! Because of my eye surgery, the chemicals in the room really dried out my eyes and I felt like I was blinking with raisins under my eyelids! I sat there and went through a lot of eyedrops while Jeremy played with the kids. Maybe next time for me!

Even though the day was long with all of our stops, it went relatively smooth and we all enjoyed ourselves.