This post is backing up a little bit - back to July. Josh and I (well, mostly Josh) worked for months planning an awesome road trip for our family vacation. After much debate and research we decided to buy a travel trailer and take it with us. We originally thought about hotels along the way but decided that 2 hotel rooms each night would be quite expensive, not to mention a pain in the booty loading and unloading all the kids and all the luggage every single night. So then we looked into renting an RV but that was about as expensive as buying a new one so we decided to bite the bullet and haul our lodging around with us. Josh spent quite a bit of time researching the best type of RV and what would fit our family the best, etc. and I spent a lot of time researching taking a big family on a long trip in a very small RV. Amazingly, there is quite a bit of information out there on big families and RVs. Mostly on bigger families than ours even!
At first, we had decided to just do a few National Parks, but once we got planning we realized that the next National Park would only be 2-3 hours a way or just a day and before we knew it, we were about to embark on a trip that would take us to every single state in the West except Washington! We set off in the early morning of July 26 hoping to make it all the way to Manassa. It was a VERY long day. We realized that our gas mileage going down drastically was something we hadn’t planned on. We knew it would go down, we just didn’t realize how far down it would go! We also realized that we really shouldn’t try to go more than 300 miles a day. Anything more was just torturous. We did make it to Manassa, though the trip was much longer than it should have been and we finally crawled onto their street around 10:45 pm. We crashed at GG and YoPapa’s house for a day and then got ready to hit the road again. We made the most of that one day with GG and YoPapa though. They were especially excited to finally get to meet Emily and Grace. Granny and Pops were also there, along with Brianne and John and their family who were on their way up to (or home from, I forget) Utah.
We headed up to Mom and Dad’s property for a hot dog roast that Sunday. It started raining pretty much right when we got there. Not hard but enough that we were getting wet. Most of us took refuge in or near the garage that Mom and Dad built on the property to it house all their 4-wheelers and motorcycles. These boys were determined to stick it out though and I found them like this eventually. Cash did tell us later on that "he now knows what a hobo feels like” after all the time spent outside in the rain without a coat. Crazy kid!
Once the rain stopped, we busted out the toys. Daddy took all the kids for a ride. We tried to get Grace on the 4-wheeler but she was NOT having it.
I think it was mostly the noise. She had seen all the other kids go and said she wanted to up until I put her on Daddy’s lap. Emily was all for it though!
The two big kids were super excited about getting to drive this year.
GG looks almost as thrilled as Grace was!
After the menfolk got the fire going we started roasting our hot dogs. I think this was the girls’ first hot dog and they liked it!
Greg and Kris and most of their kids and kids’ families came up and joined us after a while.
A real man cooks four hot dogs at once!
These two had lots of fun together.
The boy found some dirt to play in.
Kory’s little girl sure got loved on!
The rest of the family was excited to meet Emily and Grace too!
We stuffed ourselves with s’mores and hung around the campfire talking and singing along with the ukuleles Josh and I brought. It was a wonderful evening. Hanging out around a campfire with family is on my top 10 best things in the whole world.
We left bright and early the next morning headed for our the start of our big adventure! Next stop, Monument Valley in Arizona.
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