Welcome to day two of our epic June 2019 family vacation. Before I dive into the shenanigans of June 3rd, I want to go back a bit and talk for a brief minute on the travel journals I made for everyone. I had almost forgot about those. I went down to my family history cabinet and dug mine out, and I'll be using it a bit to help me put this blog post together. I made the journals with a lot of help from Pinterest. I found a lot of cute car games and journal prompt pages. I had two different journal prompt pages. A silly fun one and one for the days when we would be visiting the church history sites. The journal prompt for the days we would be visiting sites, at the top I listed the things that we wanted to do for the day. I didn't remember it for yesterday's post, so I want to quickly share with you some of what I wrote for June 2nd. I will probably share all the things I wrote on my silly journal pages, but some of the really personal spiritual stuff I put on my church history journal pages I might not share all of it.
Today's date is: June 2, 2019
Today we visited: Lots & lots of Wyoming & endless, smelly Nebraska
Today's weather: Cloudy, rainy, & windy
Today I feel:: Happy
What I saw today: Rolling hills. Plains. Rain Storms. A Coyote. A cute black & white cat. Trees. Clouds. Lots of semi trucks. Way too many cows in too small of an area.
My favorite part of the day: Playing road trip games that I printed off.
I liked: The scenery.
I did not like: The smell from the cows, and the accident at the gas station in Little America.
It was funny when: I kept farting and making it smell. Hearing everyone gag from the smell of the cows.
And now we can proceed with.....
3 JUNE 2019
We woke up to rain. It rained all through breakfast. It rained all through cleaning up camp. It rained all through getting ready for the day. It rained the whole drive to the Winter Quarters Visitor Center. However, it stopped raining just as we were getting out of the car. Tender mercies.
So, for Monday, June 3rd, according to my journal our plan was to visit The Mormon Trail Center, Winter Quarters Temple, and Mormon Pioneer Cemetery. Then we would drive to Council Bluffs, Iowa and visit the Kanesville Tabernacle.
We visited everything except for Council Bluffs, Iowa. From Winter Quarters, our next destination was Independence, Missouri. As soon as we had finished at Winter Quarters, it started raining again and with all of that rain came a lot of flooding. A lot of the freeways we were going to use had been shut down, which meant we would take A LOT of detours. So, we decided to skip going to Council Bluffs and just head straight to Missouri so we could arrive at a decent time.
Alright, the first set of pictures are when we had arrived at the Winter Quarters Visitor Center and were all piling out of the D.S.S.V........
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| Jacen testing to see if he can feel any rain on his fingers. As you can see by how wet everything is and the clouds in the sky, it literally stopped raining as we were getting out of the D.S.S.V. |
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| We are, number one, so very glad that the rain has stopped.... |
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| And number two, that we are out of the D.S.S.V. |
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| While we were waiting for everyone to find their shoes, and get them on, Spider Monkey discovered some patches of Clover..... |
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| He was very excited when he found a 4-leaf Clover. |
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| And because we are all ADD, we spent a few minutes being distracted by Clover and everyone trying to find a 4-leaf Clover........ |
And the lucky winners of the 4-leaf Clover hunt were......
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| Jacen found one |
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| Cousin R found one. |
After the 4-leaf Clover hunt, we made our way across the street to the visitor center. We toured the visitors center, went across the street and saw the temple. Part of the temple grounds is an old Pioneer Cemetery. We went and saw that too, however, the pictures I took of the cemetery are part of the ones that got lost when my computer malfunctioned. But here are the few pictures I did get of Winter Quarters.
Next stop, Independence, Missouri. We were in for ANOTHER long car ride to get to our next destination. We spent the better part of the day in the car.
We begin with episode 2 of, "What do 9 kids on a long car ride do?" They take lots of selfies, make weird faces, take random pictures of each other, take random pictures of their siblings sleeping, play around on their phones, take pictures of the back of mom and dad, and take LOTS AND LOTS of pictures out of the D.S.S.V windows.
Because of all the rain, there was a lot of flooding. So much flooding that the majority of the main highways and freeways we wanted to take were closed due to being completely submerged in water. So, the great Google Maps took us on many a detour. We got to see lots of fields of corn. I get so lost without my mountains. Half the time I didn't even know what direction we were going in.
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This is pretty much all you see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and......well, you get the picture.
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We drove down little two lane roads through farm lands, we passed through many small towns, and gassed up at small town gas stations. We also saw some interesting buildings....
As we were driving, we hit some spots where we could get a really good view of the flooding. We were all amazed at just how much water there was and all of the massive flooding going on. And it also continued to rain for most of our drive.
This was my first time being anywhere east of Colorado. Up until this time, the largest "river" I had ever seen was the Colorado River. All of my life, to me, that was a BIG river..........and then I saw the Missouri River for the first time, with my own little eyeballs........ and those little eyeballs of mine just about popped right out of my head and my jaw just dropped. It made the Colorado look like a small meandering stream.
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| I didn't know rivers like this existed....well I did, but having not ever personally seen them, I imagined them to be marginally bigger than the Colorado. I was definitely shocked and amazed. This picture doesn't even do the sheer size of the river justice. |
As we were getting closer to our destination, the route we were taking took us right past the Kansas City, Missouri temple. So, we got the best pictures we could from a fast moving vehicle.
It was evening when we were finally pulling into our destination. We had booked a campground that was just down the road from the Community of Christ.........um........"temple." The first thing that Meow-meow said when he saw it was, "It's an ice cream cone building." From that time forward, it was referred to as "the ice cream cone building." We had one heck of a time getting Meow-meow to not call it that while we were taking a tour of the building.....but that's a blog post for another day. And now for the last pictures of us arriving into Independence.
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| It looks like a giant ice cream cone. |
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| Getting ready for bed. |
I mentioned yesterday that there were some, "incidents" along the way...... Well, one "incident" that plagued us the whole way and yet was a huge miracle at the same time, was the silly AC in the trailer. It's really hot and muggy back east and gets even hotter and muggier after it rains. Having lived my entire life in a dry desert, this was a very new experience for me. I'm used to the temperature cooling down when it rains, I'm also used to it cooling down at night. Nope, not where we were and when in hot and muggy conditions such as they were, a working AC is a must have. Well, the trailer's AC decided to go kaput. Nathan made several phone calls to his uncle to try and figure things out. We still aren't sure how we managed to get the silly AC to work because by all logical means and reasons, the lengths we went to get it to work shouldn't have, yet they did. We really did have our prayers answered. Because truly, the only reason we were able to get the AC to work was by divine intervention. The truly interesting thing is that the AC would only work when we really needed it to and only after praying for it to work. This was our daily routine with the trailer AC throughout the entire vacation.
Alright, now for my travel journal entries for Monday, June 3, 2019. I'll first start with the more spiritually minded one.
Interesting things I have learned: The pioneers really had to learn to be tough and endure.
Thoughts and impressions I have had: We are on the Lord's vacation for us and on His timeline. We are enduring small trials so that we can appreciate what the Pioneers went through.
What was my favorite part? Why? The Pioneer Cemetery. I enjoyed the peace that was there. The cemetery is part of the temple grounds. The temple and the grounds are a place of peace.
And now for the silly journal entries:
Today's date is: June 3, 2019
Today we visited: Winter Quarters
Today's weather: Rainy
Today I feel: Happy
What I saw today: A lot of rain. Beautiful scenery. Lots of corn fields. Flooding. Winter Quarters Visitor Center & Temple. Pioneer cemetery. Kansas City Temple.
My favorite part of the day: The thunderstorms. (I love thunderstorms. The ones we have out here pale in comparison to those back east. I really, really enjoyed those thunderstorms. I could have listened to them for hours on end.)
I liked: Looking at the scenery.
I did not like: All the rain
It was funny when: We saw the Stoner drug store. (The kids found it to be highly hilarious and we made many jokes about it. It's one of the buildings I took a picture of.)
And with that, we wrap up for 2019. Let's now jump in our time machine and program the flux capacitor for June 3, 2020...........
3 JUNE 2020
Well, now, what was happening at the Davis household?????
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| Gimli sleeping |
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| So adorable. |
Apparently, Gimli adorably sleeping was all that was going on at the Davis household. Well, it wasn't the only thing going on, but the only thing I got pictures of. I, however, on that day, did spend most of my time working on the house, which probably accounts for why I don't have a lot of pictures. I still swear I took more pictures than what I have.. This right here is why I don't trust technology. And yet people want self driving cars........
Well, I've got things to attend to, so I will end this blog post here. Come back tomorrow for the next chapter.
