It has been a year and a half since we last made our way to St. Louis. A few months ago we were trying to decided what we wanted to do for Spring Break. Our kids have so much fun with their cousins when we are all together. Like so much fun it is beyond fun. We actually all have a way super indescribably awesome time when we are all together. The kids are all getting older. We have 2 cousins getting married this year. And 2 graduating from high school next year. Then after that it will just snowball and we will have kids graduating and getting married and going on missions like crazy. We realized we only have a short time to get these young'uns together. So it was settled. Spring Break in Missouri! I was excited because every time we go it is in the winter. I was so looking forward to some warm Missouri weather and a chance to do all the things we never can do when it is so cold. At the time we decided this, we were experiencing our bajillionth straight day of single digit weather and we had several feet of eternal snow on the ground. Yep. I've been lookin' forward to this trip for a long time. Just a few days before our trip, school was canceled in Missouri because of snow....I was not happy. The weather forecast showed to warming up right before we came and then getting cold and lasting for our entire trip.
So last Friday as soon as the kids got outta school (Emily didn't want to ruin her perfect attendance) we loaded ourselves into the van and began our journey. We were leaving the most absolute perfect weather in Utah for the most absolute freezing weather in Missouri. I was not happy about this whole situation, but I remembered it was not the weather we were going for.
We stopped for dinner at KFC in Wyoming. I am still incredibly irritated when I think about what happened in that KFC parking lot. When we first pulled in and parked, we parked in one of the only open parking spaces, which happened to be next to a parking space filled with the containers and trash from someones dinner. After we ate, we were sitting in the van getting ready to leave and we had the side van door open waiting for one of the kids to come out of the bathroom. This incredibly judgmental old man and his wife pulled up in front of us and were talking and motioning to us. I thought they were trying to tell us that we had a flat tire or our gas tank was open or something. I told Steve to open his window and see what he was trying to say. The old dude just pointed to us and then pointed to the trash and waived his hand with a look of incredible disgust on his face and then drove off. I still didn't get what we was trying to say until Steve said something about the jackdonky thinking that we were the ones who left that trash there. I was so mad that someone would think I was trashy enough to sit in a parking lot and empty out all our trash with four kids sitting there. I seriously told Steve to go follow that rude and judgmental old man so we could tell him that we were not the ones who made that trashy mess. But we still had a kid in the bathroom and by the time they came out the old man was no where in sight. Still. I'm still incredibly irritated when I think about it.
Later that night we stopped at a rest stop. While Zac was waiting for the rest of us to come out, he climbed a tree. His cell phone was falling out of his pocket while he was climbing so he took it out of his pocket and put it in the trunk of the tree. We were quite a ways down the road when he realized that his phone was still in that tree trunk. We were trying to decide what to do. The phone wasn't that expensive and we could have bought him another one when we got to St. Louis. But he started freaking out because he had all his contacts and pictures in that phone. I'm a softy when it comes to pictures. We couldn't remember how long we had been driving but we estimated it had been about 30 minutes. So we decided we would turn around and go get it. Unfortunately we had to drive forward about another 15 miles to get to an exit so we could turn around ( we were in the middle of nowhere). And then after turning around, we realized we had been driving a LOT longer than 30 minutes. And the best part was that after we retrieved the phone we didn't have enough gas to turn around and drive forward again so we had to continue back peddling until we could find a gas station. So we pretty much spent the entire evening traipsing back and forth across the middle of Wyoming.
This made for a super long day Saturday. We ended up eating lunch in the middle of Nebraska which is usually where we stop overnight. Here we are at our lunch spot. One good thing about traveling in the Spring instead of the winter is we can picnic along the way. We made it into St. Louis around midnight Saturday night and we have been having fun ever since.
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