cross country Rhodes trip

1: little miss six likes to travel like her momma… she takes everything but the kitchen sink!
2: holy holy holy, upstate new york is beautiful! (visiting the LDS church history sites in palmyra, new york.)

3: the kids loved taking turns driving with danny in the u-haul truck.

4: something about all that water and all its power makes me feel uneasy… small. weak. it’s amazing, but i’m terrified of being near it. same feeling happens to me on big bridges and in the ocean.

5: we dined here. beautiful view. not the best food.

6: one of my girlfriends from h.s. lives in buffalo, new york – the entire time i lived in boston we hoped to meet up, so it finally happened! we hadn’t seen each other in at least fifteen years. she is a seriously talented momma, check out her blog here!

7: our family has a fetish with starbucks.  if you haven’t had an iced chai, or their egg white, spinach feta wrap – try one of those {or both!} soon!

8:  we stopped in ohio for lunch and hugs with husbands niece.  it was so fun – and the most charming town!

9: have you ever looked closely at the roots of a corn stalk? driving through the midwest was incredible – corn fields as far as the eye can see!

10: husband is a big fan of nike stores. *chicago has one of the best.

*i am completely electrified by the energy of monstrous buildings, taxi line-ups, enticing windowfronts, and huddles of pedestrians making their way to city adventures. and i imagine they are all very important and off to do something fabulous… and if that isn’t the case, i never want to know otherwise.

11: we celebrated america’s independence day split between chicago and small town (south beloit) wisconsin. it was the cutest town, and we watched fireworks over the river from our hotel. we were truly living the american dream – moving from one adventure to another with our family – i felt wildly blessed to be a citizen in this great nation.

12: we all had our first butterburgers  in wisconsin dells, that city is the place to be in the summer! wow!  water parks galore!!!

13: my co-pilot, eli howell.

14: the most amazing oatmeal raisin cookies ever!

15: somewhere in minnesota – along i-90 is the most mind-blowing stretch of wind farms. hundreds of them! it’s absolutely unreal. i’ve never seen so many. have you seen them? we were all stunned by their beauty.

16: my backseat fashion designer. using wipes to make dresses for her dolls.

17: porter sculpture park. one of america’s top fifty roadside attractions by TIME!

18: we stumbled upon an original-authentic 1880’s town – it was the best surprise! {it was used to film Dances with Wolves – which happens to be the first “big” book i read in elementary school and i loved the movie!}

19: 1880’s town has a saloon that is open all year for live music, chess, rootbeer in the bottle, and dress-up clothing in the back!

20: yolo! WALL DRUG. their site says it’s america’s favorite roadside attraction! we had to stop because after 200 miles of seeing billboards advertising for this place, we couldn’t drive pass and not see what all the advertising was about! all signs lead to Wall Drug!

mt. rushmore: one of the moments — one of many on this trip — where I stood in awe, in gratitude, in perfect contentment. i’m so happy to be right here, right now i thought.

21: the u-haul had minor problems along the way – thankfully we had danny to help us out. fyi: u-haul had incredible customer service when we needed it.

22: young faithful meets old faithful.

23: wildlife in yellowstone national park. we were really really hoping to see some bears, but we crossed paths with elk, and…

24: a huge herd of buffalo!

25: sela’s little bunny, bun-oh visited all the sites across america with us. {jackson hole, wyoming}

26: the tetons! and our caravan. Our caravan, well, RV now looks amazing with all of the Hobby Caravan parts we’ve bought to accompany it. Finding out that we can afford a caravan was truly a turning point in our life chapter, we have such good fun when we go on holiday! It needs a pretty powerful RV battery to keep it going but we all love it so much!

27: the last day of our trip. (afton, wyoming)

***

we went from boston massachusetts to northern utah in eight days. (which i consider close enough to be cross country!} we had three hotel rooms each night, and stayed in different hotels for eight nights in a row. we used hotels.com for all of our reservations, and our favorite hotel was this one in rapid city, south dakota – it was an unexpected, modern surprise! on day two of our trip we only drove two hours. whoops. (touristy distractions are to blame, and fun friends!) but we typically drove six hours/day.

so as we drove… miles across america i fell in love with this country even more. i was in awe of how diverse and beautiful our country is – i thought it would be exhausted and feel like america was sooo big. it was the opposite. our eight days of driving made america feel smaller, one tightly-knit nation. i am blessed to tears to be an american.

our kids were troopers! {honk-honk} i don’t know if i should even tell you that we didn’t have one meltdown. well, besides the time kiana managed to wake-up too quickly and knocked her head into a wall reaching for her iPhone. she didn’t actually have a meltdown, but a nifty goose egg on her forehead. she also broke a hotel vase in the process. another whoops.

i am so proud of my three-thousand-mile road trip movin’ family. road trips are super fun…and if ‘super fun’ had any i’s in it…i’d dot them with big bubbly hearts this time. i’ve never been very good at ending happy events like holidays and vacations. i tend to clean-up too quickly, or move on a little too fast. but it’s easy when you slide from happy road trip to happy new home. from boston adventures, niagara falls, chicago, mt rushmore, and yellowstone national park, i’ve been **deprogrammed. i am ready to reestablish our home routines starting with the most familiar and well-established and add some new, inspired by travel.

school starts two weeks from tuesday here in utah and that will kick-off our new routines!

**apologies for the month long hiatus!

{photos by me, Jane Rhodes}