our weekend

went like this…

we were going to leave in the afternoon. by 1pm at best.

but dusty needed to work and i had lots of things i wanted to get done before we left town…and if we waited till 9pm, then we could pick up kiana from dance and she could go with us too instead of stay home with grandma.

so, we ended up starting our 10-hour drive at 10pm.

i did all the driving except the last hour on the way to bridgeport, california. because my night-owl tendencies kicked in and i was not tired at all.

almost exactly ten hours later we rolled into our hotel (very small-town hotel) at 7am, california time. the posted sign said the “office hours” were 8am-10pm, which was a big surprise to us considering we had reservations and expected to be able to check-in at any hour. especially after calling the hotel the night before and telling them via voicemail that we would be arriving early in the morning.

to kill time for an hour we made the 30-second drive up and down main street only to learn that every hotel in this town was advertising “NO VACANCIES,” this small-town is an incredibly busy tourist destination. then, we sat in the car, everyone except kiana wide awake. me: exhausted at this point. and waited an hour for the office to open. 8am. dusty goes in the office and comes back out pretty quickly with a strange look on his face.

strange look explained: dusty had somehow made our reservations for september 7-9th, not august 7-9th. whoops. at this point of exhaustion, we laughed and laughed. this threw our memories back to traveling in asia {for 2 years} when we were newly-married. this kind of thing happened to us ALL THE TIME. but now that we have kids, it’s a whole new story. we attempted to find a room in this “NO VACANCY” town and did not succeed. we ended up driving 30 miles to the next available room in walker, california. which was this little cabin-we were tickled as could be to find such a cute place, and the kids were sooo excited to jump out of the car, run around finding lizards and to get inside to see our cabin. our cute cabin with a dreadful interior.

kj’s words: “this place stinks.”

but after 24 hours of no sleep, we accepted stink. we took naps, woke up, showered and attended bridget & scott’s wedding {post below.}

after the wedding, we headed back to our cabin and opened the door to find ants. LOTS of ants. I immediately looked on websites like pestcontrolexperts.com to get a pest control guy out to help us.

kiana words, “can we just go to reno to see uncle kenny right now?”

dusty said, “we are not sleeping here.” and we packed up and headed down the road a little farther…to the embassy suites at lake tahoe. our official accomodations for the day. there was no stink. no ants. and we loved every minute of lake tahoe. we had fabulous food, it’s gorgeous this time of year, and we left all agreeing that we’d like a summer lake home in lake tahoe. dusty and i went on our honeymoon to lake tahoe and spent time skiing at heavenly so it was fun to show the kids our honeymoon destination. after a beautiful day at lake tahoe, we headed down through carson city {where we stopped briefly at in-n-out} on our way through reno. dusty’s brother and our sister-in-law jennee live outside of reno on 40 acres scattered with arena’s, corrals, and horses.


right about this time in our evening, kj had been riding a horse with dusty. he asked dusty to let him get off so he could climb on this gate with myla…

after dusty let kj off the horse, dusty trotted off on his horse inside the arena…

and kj said {loudly}, with total concern in his voice

“dad! are you sure you’re ready for that???”

“they’re gonna let one of those bulls loose, and that thing your on is gonna chase after it!!!”

omgosh. we laughed & laughed! kj does not realize the cowboy-background his big papi has…dusty was raised {18 years} on a cattle ranch in southern nevada, and most of his siblings still live in rural nevada.

dusty is the black sheep of his family. {city boy}…a few challenges with our hotels, the wedding, lake tahoe, and seeing our girls thrilled that they get to spend the week riding horses…

totally worth a lack of sleep, and two ten-hour drives.