I may have mentioned this before, but we are trying to see as many of the 50 states as we can before our kids start leaving home in another seven or eight years. Having Jeremy put a different spin on this whole endeavor, as we’ll probably have to repeat most of them with him when he’s old enough to actually remember, but we decided this summer to knock out several that none of us had visited and to do it by car.
Here is where we went.
Of course, we started and ended in Illinois, but I somehow missed the sign coming back from Wisconsin.
Before I start blogging in earnest about the trip, I should probably clarify a few things about our definition of “seeing” a state! Take, for instance, the state of Nebraska. No offense to any Nebraskans out there, but Nebraska is not really a destination-type state for us, so “seeing” it meant driving into it, snapping a picture to prove we’d been there, and driving back into Iowa. To give ourselves a little credit, we had planned to spend a few hours in Omaha, but that was a big fail due to the small matter of a natural disaster. (More on this later.)
We also didn’t go to the cool part of South Dakota. We stayed on the eastern side in Sioux Falls because to go to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore would have added two days that we didn’t have to our trip. Distance with just what we did was about 2,000 miles and lasted 10 days. As Jeff will have a bazillion frequent flier miles that he has to use in the next year, we’re hoping to fly to Colorado and catch western South Dakota as part of a “west” road trip for our next vacation. We shall see!
Anyway, our departure date was Saturday, July 2. Jeff returned from Thailand on July 1, and we had tickets for a Iowa Cubs baseball game in Des Moines, Iowa, at 7:05 that evening. As it takes about five hours to get from here to there, we had a drop dead departure time of 12:00.
That morning, I got up at 5:45 to meet a friend for a 10-mile run. As you might remember, this was right about the time that the heat wave started. The temperature was 75 degrees with 90 percent humidity when we started, and 85 degrees when we finished. It was almost too hot to stand. I lost three pounds in water weight during that run, which just can’t be good. I guess the one benefit is that I finally got a taste of what training for a marathon through the summer months will be like. Yikes!
As we had not started any type of packing until Saturday morning, that’s what we frantically did when I got home. We had all the laundry done, but nothing was in suitcases yet. We needed running clothes and shoes, pool towels for the Wisconsin Dells, and baby paraphernalia, in addition to all of the normal stuff, like clothes, for a trip. Somehow, we managed to get packed and loaded and on the road by about 12:30. This was 30 minutes past our desired departure time, but, all in all, not too bad!
About two hours away from home, we realized that we had forgotten Jeff’s high blood pressure medication. There’s nothing like embarking late on a nine-day road trip, with three kids, jet-lagged beyond belief, on a holiday weekend, and without any chemical means of lowering your blood pressure. Oops.
But other than that, we had everything else and were on our way. We stopped for a late lunch at Chick-Fil-A in the Quad Cities area and motored toward Des Moines.
Let the adventure begin!
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