The photos are piling up! And we are just getting started!

The last day of the road trip, we stopped in Spring Green, Wisconsin. In the morning, we got up and went to a very weird museum called The House on the Rock.

At first, the boys really enjoyed it.

It had a lot of strange sculptures and a really pretty grounds.

They had a huge collection of musical instruments and musical contraptions.

“The Infinity Room” jutted out in to the forest with no supports underneath.

As the musical contraptions got bigger and louder, the boys liked the place less.

They really liked the 200ft long sculpture of a whale fighting a giant octopus. I couldn’t take a picture. We had to climb up to the 3rd floor to look down on it.

That face

This place boasts the world’s largest carousel. This is where the boys lost it. It was so loud!

As we continued, the rooms got bigger, stranger, and louder. The boys were DONE, but the rest was a maze!

The bathrooms were even weird

We were all glad to get back outside.

We made it! Lots of cousin time already!

Minecraft with cousins too!

Friday night, we met Aunt Beth, Uncle Steve, Eric and Liz at Lou Malnati’s for Chicago style pizza. Uncle Steve was the Alfred to Brendan’s Batman and took care of anything he needed.

Trevor was the parmesan dispenser for the whole table.

The boys were tired but it was a great evening.

When we got home late that night, there was a little jam up of feet and Gizmo got stepped on. He has some fractures in his little toes on his back right leg. He has to have his foot in a splint. The poor puppy just wants to play with all of his kids.

Saturday, Bill flew back to Phoenix to go back to work. 🙁 We miss him a lot.

Kayla is trying to help me scout locations for a group picture.

Enjoying the beautiful weather with Gramma. It is 40 degrees cooler here than at home. Whew!

Brendan enjoying some Lego time with Uncle Kevin

Today (Monday) we headed back to Wisconsin. We visited the Jelly Belly warehouse for a free tour.

It was a pretty silly little train ride around the warehouse. I was hoping there was a factory to see, but it was just little videos about the factory in California.

They said the paper hats were “mandatory”

Brendan was expecting it to be loud.

The store was big. They had a “Sampling Bar” where you could try any flavor you wanted of any candy they made. Trevor liked this. A LOT.

Next we headed to the Mars Cheese Castle

Say Cheese!

We picked up some cheeses and headed home.

So we could jump in the hot tub!

We have a full schedule of fun planned, but Caleb already has a cold. We don’t want that to spread around. It is sad that he has already missed out on a dinner and play time with the boys.

Get ready for one of the largest posts ever. This is Day 5 of our big road trip and I finally have a decent wi-fi connection and sound asleep boys.

Our trip started out with a literal bang. We were only about an hour from home. A full tread separation tire blowout did quite a bit of damage to the body of the trailer.

Bill got the tire changed quickly, we had two full sized spares.

We were feeling nervous enough that we started calling tire shops trying to find another spare the right size. We finally found our tire in Albuquerque, NM. To be safe, we put four new ones on. The old tires did not have so many miles on them, but they were just old.

During all of the chaos at the tire shop, Bill went to swing the trailer around to where they could work on it and forgot he just took the busted tire out of the truck. The tailgate of the truck was still down and crushed right in to the underside of the trailer. This door is under the cap where the generator storage is. You can see that the door is just made of styrofoam. Thankfully, this means the truck was not damaged.

We stayed the first night in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The boys did an awesome job being passengers.

Day 2: We made it to Colorado Springs, Colorado. TWELVE years ago, Bill and I made this drive to IL with his dad and we stopped at Cave of the Winds. Standing in the lobby, we decided that Jack was not up for the tour physically, and we left. We have been meaning to come back ever since.

We had about an hour wait until our tour.

Ready?

The boys love to play minecraft and we talked quite a bit about caves and rocks and ores. They were ready for the “Real Life Cave!”

It was a guided tour, so there was not much time to stop and set up pictures without holding up the group.

Trevor told me a couple of times, “This real life cave stuff is awesome!”

Bill carried Brendan the majority of the tour, but he surprised us with how much he was able to do!

In the visitor’s center, there is a big wooden structure with all of these tunnels and turns that the kids can climb all over. This is great because they were not able to touch or climb in the real cave. They went through the maze twice!

We stayed in this little tight RV park behind the parking lot of an O’Reilly’s Auto parts.

Day 3 was the longest in miles. We drove through Wyoming and in to South Dakota. It was a whole lot of nothing to see punctuated by rest stops with playgrounds. (What an awesome idea that is. Perfect way to “get the wiggles out”)

It was super windy!

Our view from the campground Monday night in Rapid City, South Dakota.

We stayed at a KOA campground that had this enormous “Fun Zone”. The boys spent almost an hour on this enormous jumping pillow. (again, what an awesome idea!)

A few days before leaving on the trip, Brendan had a hard tug on his g-tube and I suspected that it broke. It lasted a while, but the button finally came out. So we already had to use a spare and put in a new button.

Tuesday morning, we visited Mount Rushmore. It was around 55 degrees and would have been great but there was this sustained 20MPH wind that would gust up to at least 50MPH. It was brutal!!

The boys were actually good spirits about it and just tried to keep their hoods on.

Another session of jumping to get the blood moving before more car time.

Pretty much all of Tuesday was spent driving across someone’s Windows XP desktop wallpaper. 😀
It was plain, plain plains.

We stopped in Sioux Falls, SD when we just ran out of energy for driving. We fell short of our target for the first time, but those tremendous winds chased us. We were in a black hole of communications too. We could not get any kind of signal from Verizon or T-Mobile. The campground Wi-Fi was a joke and would not work. So we did laundry. Yay!

This morning, we stopped for lunch in Blue Earth, Minnesota. There is a Dairy Queen next to a 55ft tall Jolly Green Giant.

I appreciate the beautiful trees, Trevor likes to kick them

As we continued into Wisconsin today, things got a little weird. First our GPS took us on a bizarre detour off of the main highway and in to these single lane country roads. We were getting nervous.
This barn looks nervous too. It had such a slant, I don’t know how it is still standing.

We made it back to the main road only to discover that the bridge was out over a small creek and the road was closed. Another long detour through roads close to too small for the trailer and we made it to our resting point.

We are at this beautiful RV park and resort right on the Wisconsin River. This riverbank is only about 50ft from the back of our trailer. It is beautiful!

Selfies are really hard with a 5lb camera!

The boys got their wiggles out at the campground playground as the sun started to set over the river.

We are going to visit some touristy stuff in the morning and then we are in to the 4hr home stretch! We all are so excited to see everyone!!