Nauvoo Road Trip : Day 1

When things got hectic a few weeks ago Jonathan and I decided we needed to get away from the house and all the crazy and go on a family vacation. We decided on Nauvoo, Il, so we could tour the church history sites and see his sister, Kirsten, and my friend, Chandler. It was a much needed trip, and the kids did surprisingly well on the road.

We got off a lot later than we planned (by two hours, we got on the road at 7:30 a.m.) and got stuck in traffic in the middle of nowhere I-94, so we were pretty delayed. Not as delayed as some, though, if we'd been on time we actually would have gotten stuck in worse traffic. A Greyhound bus rear-ended a semi and 11 people were shipped off to a hospital a half hour away. People were standing outside their cars shooting the breeze with neighboring cars. We were lucky and got off the freeway!

But we finally made it out of Michigan, across Indiana, and into Illinois.

 The rental van we got had a TV in it. David was in heaven! We watched LoTR the whole time.

We stopped at a couple of rest areas for lunch and to stretch. Funny enough we actually ran into the same older couple and their friend at each stop! They remembered each of the kids names the second stop. They liked that they were "normal" names. :)

 The second stop had a playground. We let the kids loose and I think it helped them be okay for the remaining four hours of the trip.

When we finally arrived in Nauvoo it was getting late. We quickly set up our tents, the canopy, and pulled our bikes off the bike rack, then headed down to the pageant. (I should mention here that we borrowed a car-top carrier from a friend, all of our gear and backpacks went in there. Then we had a bike rack we hooked onto the back of the car and we brought our bikes and our convertible trailer/stroller. This was a HUGE blessing because we didn't have to compete for parking, we just rode our bikes everywhere the two days were were in Nauvoo.)

It was fun watching the pageant, and we got to sit with Kirsten, Rachel F. (a friend of the family). Andi warmed up SO quickly to Kirsten! I'm always sort of nervous introducing her to new people. Fortunately Kirsten was good about rolling with the punches and approached Andi on her terms (exactly as our Speech Therapist said to) and Andi was curled up in Kirsten's lap in no time. 

(Complete tangent, but I am so grateful for the trained professionals! They've made our lives so much easier with Andi! There have been those who have not followed the pros, even after I warned them how Andi best handles new people, and I'm afraid her relationship with those individuals is going to be strained at best because she still identifies one of them as "that mean guy". Life is just better when you listen to the pros!)

After the pageant Chandler found us and walked up to our campsite and we sat and talked for a while. Good friends and good talks, that's all I need sometimes, and life is all better. :)