Wild West

We spent the last two weeks of July doing a whirlwind tour of the West.  We visited nine states and drove over 4000 miles.  (We saw a lot and this post will be long, but there are lots of pretty pictures like this one from Utah.)

It wasn't the most convenient time for this trip for several reasons, but we kind of felt we needed to do it.

First of all, Ian's side of the family is all out that way, and there were several relatives of his we hadn't seen in a long time or had never even met, and we felt a need to address that.  It's hard for us to travel anyplace we can't reach by car, so usually seeing family means seeing my family, but we wanted our kids to get to know the other side of their family, too.

And second, our oldest is halfway through high school and we won't have that many opportunities to travel together as a family in a few years and there is a lot we want our kids to see.  We've barely scratched the surface, really, of what we want to show them in the world, but at least when they go off on their own they will have a decent idea of the scope and variety of what's in our own country, and that's a start.

My kids are good at road trips, but we didn't want to spend time driving across parts of the country we've already seen, so we flew to Salt Lake City and rented a car to drive from there.  The plan was to pick up camping gear in the first few days of the trip to use later, but the one snag in the plan was the equipment we scoped out at our local Walmart that we figured we could find during our travels was not available in the quantities we needed at any single store.  We had to stop at several of them to get five cots (after our air mattress disasters we decided cots were the new way to go), but toward the end of our trip my kids said they preferred to go hungry rather than stop at another Walmart for snacks and supplies.

Our flight left Milwaukee very early on the morning of the 17th, and an incredibly kind neighbor (thankyouthanyouthankyouAubrie) drove us to the airport at 3:30a.m.  We flew first to Phoenix, then on to Salt Lake.  One of the advantages of finally traveling with older kids (they are now 16, 14, and 11) is that we could take Southwest and not have to worry about all of us sitting together.  (I remember flying to New York when Ian was deployed and trying to manage five-month-old Quinn in my lap while tending to the girls across the aisle.  Very different times.)

We picked up our rental car at the airport from Enterprise, which was the only rental car place in the city that my husband said didn't have a one-star Yelp review.  That never even occurred to me to check because how bad could a rental car place be?  Apparently pretty bad because the lines and complaints at every other place were impressive.  We piled into our new minivan and drove north through Boise to Nampa, Idaho.

It's so interesting to drive through landscapes that look nothing like home.

Custer, Jewel Cave, and the Badlands (and more)

Life is just rolling along and there is much to write about, but I need to get down the last of our trip from the beginning of August before it all fades away.  So this is the overview (with lots of pictures).

After leaving Yellowstone we stopped at the battlefield site of "Custer's Last Stand" in South Dakota.  It's not a place I would have thought to stop on my own, but Ian being a Lt Colonel in the Army is fascinated by such historical sites and his insight always brings them alive.  It's kind of amazing to stand in such a place and try to picture what people on both sides saw in that landscape as things unfolded. 

The area is beautiful but looks like an unforgiving place to live.  The memorial and graveyard are in an official park service space, but the larger drive you can do to follow the historical markers are on someone's private land.  It was a hot day and this was a relatively small stop so I was glad to do most of it in the car, but we did get out and look around periodically as Ian told us the story of the battle from various vantage points.

Yellowstone

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

Our first night in Yellowstone we were mostly just excited to finally be there, and happy to have real toilets and sinks in bathrooms that were a convenient walk from our tent.  We stayed in the Bay Bridge campground toward the middle of the park near the lake.
 
It was really crowded and busy compared to the National Forest site we'd used in Wyoming--like a camping town.  It was really smokey, too, which surprised us since fire danger was listed as high everywhere we'd been, but the campsites all had lined, sunken fire pits, and I guess it was considered safe there.  Everyone seemed to have a fire going but us that night.

No Gradual Adjustments Here

Normally as school approaches we get the kids back into some kind of bedtime routine.  Enacting bedtime forces other parts of our routine in line as well and gets us back into a more precise schedule.  That seems reasonable.  Apparently this year we were going for the unreasonable.

During summer vacation we have very few rules.  We don't tell the kids when to go to bed or get up, we get, um, flexible about mealtimes.  When I'm home and feeling ambitious I might remind them to practice violin or piano, but I'm of the belief that real unencumbered free time is valuable.  Left to their own devices my kids never get bored.  They do interesting projects and come up with interesting games, and I know how important freedom is to the creative process.  To have a big swath of unscheduled time to use as a blank canvas is a gift.  (One I wish I got for myself more often.)

So summers around here are loose when they can be.  It's nice to be able to do things for as long as you want and not care about the clock.  At the cottage the kids routinely went to bed well after we did.  Occasionally we'd bug them to be quieter, but we didn't actually want them to stop whatever odd thing it was they had laid out with foam swords and pillows and fake jewels.  There was lots of laughing involved in whatever that was, and I can't ask for more for my kids than a summer filled with laughter.

Summer with Ellora

We got to have my niece, Ellora, with us for the entire month of August.  It was great.

When she was littler, my brother's in-laws used to visit New York City from India and help care for her over summer vacations, but now that she's older there are more options.  Now she gets to venture a bit farther afield, all the way to the Midwest.

Giggling in the backseat the whole way on a nine hour drive

She and her cousins spent time in Detroit, then had a week to play at the cottage, and finally some time here in Milwaukee.  They were happy together for all of it.  I worried a little that as an only child, Ellora might get overwhelmed by the constant company of other kids, but she never did.  My kids just folded her into the puppy heap of activity and all was well.

But time watching Ellora comes with great responsibility.  Someone must remember to take The Daily Photo.

My brother, Arno, has been working on the Ellora Daily Photo Project since the day she was born over nine years ago.  One photo, every day, all aligned at her eyes to flash by in an epic time lapse:



Pretty amazing.  And when my niece is in our care the Daily Photo responsibility becomes ours, and I do NOT want to be the one who breaks the link in the chain.

Best Summer Ever

School starts for my kids the day after Labor Day this year.  They are going into fifth, third, and K5, which means for the first time all of them will be in school until 2:20 each day.  Full day school for all three kids.  Part of me is feeling sort of shocked and sad that all of my babies are now for sure definitely not babies anymore and haven't been for a long time.  But the other part of me is all in a happy dance about how bright and fun and independent they are and that they will all be in FULL DAY SCHOOL!  It's like a having a wish granted by the Time Fairy.

Anyway, I asked the kids what they wanted to do with their last weekend of summer vacation.  Was there anything we hadn't done that they had hoped to do?  They thought about it, and decided they had done it all.