Fact: Day Twenty-Four

OK--I'm finally ready to talk about the last day. Laundry is put away, toiletries are back on their shelves, and I've slept in my own bed.

Life is good.

We left Colorado pretty early in the morning and 11 miles later, saw this. The place we'd be spending most of the day.

When we stopped for gas, I remembered to take a picture of how we packed for this 24-day trip. We were ridiculously proud of our packing job. Nothing on the top of the van, nothing pulled behind on a trailer, not much under the seats where we sat.

And this is how organized it looked on the last day--again, exceptionally pleased with ourselves.
I packed 4 suitcases that were what I called Complete Days. Each one had pajamas and clean clothes for all 5 of us. When we got to a hotel, we'd take in one Complete Day suitcase, the toiletry bag, and the electronics bag (chargers, cords, laptop, etc.). And the remaining people whose arms were empty would take in a pillow or blanket. That's it. Then the next morning, the suitcase would be empty (all clothes/pjs had been worn and/or put on) and the dirty clothes from the day before would be rolled and put in the suitcase and returned to the van. When all four suitcases were full of dirty clothes, we'd find a place to do laundry. Ta-duh.

The other things we took were: Jourdan's 2 red suitcases, a black square suitcase that had church clothes, coats, and swimsuits, a blue cooler that was filled and used every day, and a white tote that had extra shoes, laundry soap, and empty space for us to put souvenirs and things we acquired along the way. And that's it.

Did I mention how much we impressed ourselves with this whole plan?
Approaching Arizona...
My photography-in-motion shots have improved immensely over the course of this trip.
The most beautiful sign we saw in 24 days.
Hooray!
Everybody jump on 3...
1....2....3.....
GO!
Stupid camera delay...

Picking up from our jump, let's try again.
Can you tell the wind is blowing on their backs? Rachel's hair is hilarious.
Matt is back in Arizona, officially.
One more try at the jump.
I do have some statistics to post in the next few days...so this blog is not yet dead, but I definitely won't be updating it as often as I did while we traveled.

We are settled home and officially ready for our summer days to begin. This morning in church, Matt turned to Jim and gave him the biggest, tightest hug. Jim hugged him back and thanked him. Matt looked at him and said in the most sincere way "I have been thinking about it...I love this country."

Our trip was a huge success.

Fact: Day Twenty-Three

I got nothing.

Home is close by, we're in a hotel for the last night. Tomorrow we have quite a long drive.

I'm tired.

We had a lovely, lazy morning at Jamie's house in Ft Collins. Will & Matt played with sticks and pocket knives (you KNOW that's going to end well...)

We had a hard time leaving her house. The kids played with Jamie at the park, Jim bought us a gourmet lunch (on accident--he didn't really understand that Whole Foods isn't a normal, human grocery store) which was delicious, and we finally hauled ourselves out of there at noon.

As we stood in the yard saying our extended goodbyes, Will hugged Jamie and said "Um, if someone gets stabbed by a stick that's been filed to a point like a spear, you have me to blame for it." Jamie thought about it for a minute and then said "Well, why don't we just get rid of it now instead?" Will thought that was a pretty good idea and he got to float his deadly weapon down the creek behind Jamie's house.

Tonight we're in Trididad, Colorado (about 15 miles from a suspected tornado tonight...woot!) and tomorrow we push on through the last 550 miles home.

We're ready.

Thanks for following our adventures! It's been a great trip.

Sunset tonight
Which is symbolically like sunset on our trip.

Fact: Day Twenty-Two

We got up SUPER early this morning, ate breakfast in the car, lost count of the billboards advertising Wall Drug (and passed Wall, SD before the drugstore even opened), ignored the thousands of other bizarre, contrived attractions on I-90 in South Dakota, sang songs from "Calamity Jane" (well, only I did), carefully navigated the winding roads of the Black Hills...and made it to MOUNT RUSHMORE....

Huh?
Seriously, it was misty/cloudy/foggy the entire day.
Sometimes it cleared to this and we could see the faint outline of Washington. The mist was getting the carving wet-ish so the water dripping down Washington's face was a bit skull-like. Awesome effect (when we could actually see it).
And we had a perfectly clear view of the rocks BELOW the presidents.
It made for a lovely, cool day...sort of romantic and misty. Not exactly the perfect viewing-a-national-monument type of day. But still.
Ah, what photoshop and a mostly-clear moment can produce!
We think Dwight belongs right...about....here. Don't you agree?
We are continuing our trip. Now it's become the trip home, officially. We can tell that we're getting closer. We passed through Wyoming (which I would say nice things about except for ALL THE CONSTRUCTION THAT SLOWED US DOWN!)

And since it was only 7 miles out of our way, we skipped over and said hi to Nebraska.
We stopped for the night in Ft Collins, CO at my sister, Jamie's house.
The consensus in the van was that maybe Colorado needs a definition of "colorful"...
We went for a walk with Jamie, Ryan, and their kids. You can see the pictures I took...and then Jamie gave me a few that she snapped along the way. Show off.
Will karate-chopping a giant stick.
The boys and Jamie and Emma launching a bark boat down the rapids.
Marta!
Ryan made us dessert...hot chocolate with a scoop of ice cream. Yum!

Jamie's pictures of the walk...Will and his skills.



There was a prairie dog field we passed and Will and Emma were sure they could catch one. There were about 75,000 prairie dog holes in this field. I was hoping that while they were stalking this hole, a prairie dog would pop up right behind them. We never saw any. The fox in the field could have had something to do with that...

The boat is ready to launch.
Off it goes, down the rapids!
The six of us crashed out in the living room. It was a super fun day!

The final story: When Jim was in college, he went with a roommate for a weekend trip to Mt Rushmore. When they got to the monument, they were at the viewing platform enjoying the view (a better view than we had). While they stood there, a man walked up with a dog on a leash. He approached the edge, looked up, paused for one second and then said "Well, there's Mt Rushmore. Come on, dog.", turned around and walked away. They thought it was funny that he made all the effort to get there and only stood for (literally) one second. It's been our trip's motto. We say the line everywhere about everything (Well, there's Niagra Falls. Come on, dog).

Will even asked if we could buy a dog and then give it away so we could be completely accurate when we got to Mt Rushmore.

Since that didn't work out, we contented ourselves with just saying the line about 55,000 times while we were there. Here's Matt and his rushed, slurred interpretation of "Well, there's Mt Rushmore. Come on, dog."

Fact: Day Twenty-One

We started today at Laura's house in Monona, Wisconsin and ended up in Mitchell, South Dakota.

It was 580-ish miles on our trip through 4 states. Well, not ALL the way through--we still have half of South Dakota still to get through. We had a nice, relaxing morning at Laura's chatting and wondering why we live so far apart--and about 10am we were all loaded up (minus Will's flip flops which we finally just gave up finding). We saw lots of fun stuff while we drove.

Like this:
WHERE ARE THE CHICKENS GOING?? This is an enormous truck full of chickens. I can't imagine a scenario wherein it is required to relocate live chickens like this. But it was highly entertaining nonetheless.



We crossed the Mississippi River and found...Minnesota! The weather was beautiful, it was really green, and we learned a few facts at the Welcome Center.
We are no longer embarrassed by the fact that Arizona has a State Balladeer. Thanks, Minnesota for having a state muffin. And a state mushroom that I did not get a photo of.
Watching the boats. That's a bunch of barges lashed together being pushed by a tugboat on the left.
This tugboat to be precise.
We swooped down into Iowa so we wouldn't miss it. Friendly sign, wouldn't you say?
This shows the scale of how flat Iowa is.
Saw this listed on the map so we decided to pull over and check it out. It's the highest point in Iowa.

At a breath-taking 1670 feet-above-sea-level, this is the view.Phoenix, AZ lies at about 1100 feet elevation. Someone has built this up really nicely--it was such a fun place. We stood on this spot and felt like King of the World. It was (not) SO high up!

The view in the other direction.
We got to sign in and leave a message--and buy a "Hawkeye Point" keychain.
They had this awesome collection of license plates from every state--the first is Iowa that says "HIGH PT", then it starts Alabama and continues to the right and ends with Washington, DC bringing up the rear (in case you want to sing the "50 Nifty United States" song with the handy license plate prompts like we did).

Because of our detour through Iowa, we didn't come into South Dakota on a road that had a welcome sign. So we have no photographic remembrance of South Dakota...yet. We'll get that tomorrow.

When we stopped for dinner, we saw that the Holiday Inn advertised "Water Slide" and we were hooked. So we got a room and the kids played for 2 hours until the life guard went off duty. Could be the best hotel indoor pool we've ever seen.

Matt at the lion.
Indooor/Outdoor water slide
Will at the top.
Matt jumping backward into the pool (I think--that doesn't look natural, whatever he's doing).
Tomorrow we go to Mt. Rushmore and the kids are VERY excited to relive a college experience that Jim had about 17 years ago. I'll tell the whole story tomorrow.

For tonight, I have one last anecdote:

Matt and I once again shared the middle bench for a leg of the trip today. We were playing with the Legos I got at the Dive and Dash and having a great time. At one point he sighed contentedly, leaned over and put his head on my shoulder, patted my arm in a reassuring manner, and said "I liked it when you were my mom. I wish you still were." A bit confused, I reminded him that I AM still his mom and he answered "Yeah, but when you're dead, I'll wish it. So I thought I'd say it now."