Home again

We made it home after a long, long day in the car on Monday. We managed to get on the road at our target time of 7 am so that made for a good beginning. We all fell asleep pretty immediately, except Chris, of course, and Max who was psyched to watch the Avengers without comment from his sisters. We had minimal traffic and smooth sailing-an excellent driving day! We met a couple of State troopers, both of whom were very nice. Emma's response, "Are we getting pulled over again??"
We stopped in Rome and had dinner at the Savoy with Aunt Myra, Uncle Don and Phil:

We arrived at home at about midnight. Charlie was confused at first and then was so excited to see us all that he wouldn't go back to sleep and was up at 5:50 am looking for playtime.

It was an amazing trip, it really was. One that we will talk about forever.  Emma's favorite part was the Mall of America, Max loved the Kalahari resort and Rosie loved the horseback riding. She also told Maureen that there weren't any bad parts which is a good answer!

We put over 7,000 miles on the car, I dread finding out the mileage we put on the credit card...

Thanks to everyone who took such good care of Charlie (who will not let us out if his sight now); Maureen, Lena, Mikey, Sara, Anais and Wendy. He is a lucky dog!

Thanks to everyone who took such good care of us by welcoming us into their homes, feeding us, letting us make a huge mess and letting us do endless loads of laundry. We were so happy to get to see all of you and hope to return the favor as soon as possible.

And now, it's back to reality:

Day 21

THE LAST DAY
It feels like we've been gone forever and we are missing Charlie and our families and friends. But we had one more glorious day to enjoy on Lake Michigan with Laura, Dave, Will and Caroline. Dave made us pancakes (but not for Rosie who is a ridiculously picky eater. This is something that we had known but really had hammered home on this trip. That's going to change when we get home Rosie, prepare yourself!).
We hung out at the pool that goes with the 1970's house. It's heated and awesome and we all had a ball in it. Then we went down to the beach that also goes along with the house and played catch in the lake. Lunch, rest in the AC (it was sunny and 90 today), more pool time, dinner, lake time, S'mores, showers and bed. Not a bad day!

Giving massages. Best sisters ever.

Baseball in bed.

Post-dinner swim. No fear of sharks at dusk.

 Dancing for the S'mores

 The Dads supervise. Happy birthday Dave!!

An excellent final day! Thanks Laura and Dave!

Day 20

We had a great, if short, day with the Kramers. Chris and Max went with Pete and Steph to watch Josh play basketball in a 3 on 3 tournament (they won the whole thing, congratulations!). I stayed home for the girls and to take them to the pool when they woke up, something that they didn't do until 11:30! I actually was starting to get worried that they had all died in the night (thank you for that particular paranoia Mom). I did manage to eat a delicious egg sandwich made for me by Peter, played with the dog, get caught up on the blog, on my People magazine gossip, my email and Facebook while they slept. They were alive and groggy when they finally got up.

 By the time the girls got up everyone was home so the kids went over to the country club pool while the grown-ups caught up. 

Koa didn't want to miss a thing.

Peter, Josh, Max, Katie, Emma Rosie and Koa

Then it was back into the car to drive west to New Buffalo, MI to meet up with the McHughs. Their new dog (Winnie the golden doodle) joins their family in 8 days so we didn't get to meet her this time around. We did, however, get to have a yummy dinner and then walked to Oinks for ice cream. They have beaten Ben and Jerrys to the punch and make a malted chocolate ice cream with pieces of malted milk balls in it. Very good, though the vanilla malted in Minneapolis with malted milk ball pieces would really be optimal. Yes, we are all going on a diet when we get home.

We tucked ourselves into our 1970's beds (their rental house is stuck in 1972, glass block and mirrors everywhere!) and had a good nights sleep in anticipation of our last day of vacation. 

Day 19

We, well, Chris, got the kids up early so we could get on the road to Lansing, MI. We anticipated a 10 hour drive, ha.
First we snuggled the pets and said goodbye to everyone:

The kids fell asleep immediately:

Can you see Rosie back there crammed between the purchases?
Then we drove. And drove. And drove. Then we sat in traffic around Chicago for THREE hours. OMG. There was serious panic about a bathroom at one point. I do not know how people do that regularly.
We arrived at the Kramers to discover that they too have a new family member! This trip has been full of new puppies-lucky for us!

Day 18

Honestly today was ridiculously low-key. We all got up late and lounged around playing with the pets, chatting and eating until about 3 o'clock. That's when we did what Amanda and I have always done well together-we shopped!
Let me just say that there are some amazing stores literally around the corner from Amanda and Greg's really cute house.

I would go every day, truly. Our first stop was a place called Hunt and Gather, a huge antique/thrift store. Max stopped me at the door and said, "Mom, don't go in there, it's creepy." It wasn't, it was FABULOUS. We rifled through shelves and boxes and stuff stacked all over the place. They had a whole 1/2 room  devoted to china. I have no idea how they don't lose hundreds of plates very day-they are stacked in piles that are as tall as I am on tables and in milk crates. It is an accident waiting to happen, thankfully not by me! We had some excellent success including a little flower chandelier for Rosie's bedroom, wooden letters for the kids rooms and a few Christmas presents. I refrained from buying the bench for the mudroom, the mannequin legs, baby doll parts, stuffed deer head or stuffed skunk.

Doesn't Chris look happy with our purchases? He did an excellent job re-packing the car.
Max had fun at the other antique shop we visited:

Once we hit Anthropologie the boys gave up and hung out in the air conditioned car watching Indiana Jones. We had even more success there and they got to watch Indie save the Ark of the Covenant. A win all the way around.

Emma only got a few blisters with her new shoes:

We slogged back to Amanda's in the heat and humidity and gathered up Greg to have some dinner.

Excellent pizza at Pizza Luce. They use huge cans of roasted red peppers to rest the pizzas on so we had to be very careful to not lose the whole pie to a slipping incident (not that we learned from anyone else's unfortunate experience or anything).

Then we had ice cream at Sebastian Joes; malted vanilla with hot fudge sauce-to die for. Ben and Jerry's needs to make a malted vanilla ice cream immediately. It would only be better with malted milk balls in it. I will call them when we get home.

August was having a snack when we got home:

Off to bed in anticipation of an early morning!

Day 17

After a couple of hours of sleep we rallied with the help of some really delicious quiche and pastries and some playtime with the dogs, Cecile and Wally:

 August the cat and Francis the husky:

We then went to the Mall of America. It actually felt smaller than I thought it would. Max and Chris bought bracelets and went nuts on the amusement park rides. Amanda, Emma, Rosie and I went shopping. This was the end result:

This was one of my favorite stops:

Also the shoe store where I bought silver loafers by Coach and Emma bought gold loafers (not by Coach)! They aren't as bad as they sound, I promise!

The dogs like to be stacked and carried:

A great nights sleep was had by all, Emma even slept until 10 which made her very happy. Now we need to get motivated and go see Minneapolis. Tomorrow we go to Michigan where we get to see the Kramers in Lansing and then the McHughs in New Buffalo before we head home on Monday.

Day 16

We woke up to 42 degrees and more sunny skies. We broke out the stove and made more pancakes then took forever breaking up camp. We didn't leave until 11 which was not brilliant considering we had a long drive ahead of us!
Max, Rosie and I sat in the back so we could watch The Avengers and Chris and Emma kept an eye out for more bears in the front seat as we drove out of the park and headed towards North Dakota. The Avengers was a fun movie, but the scenery was even more amazing. We ended up on the Bear Tooth highway which is twisty and goes to over 10,000 feet. There were glaciers everywhere so we stopped to check them out and throw some snowballs at each other.

The views were amazing!

We stopped at the rest area at the top and met some overly friendly chipmunks and marmots who came right to up to us looking for food.

We realized about halfway through that we were going to end up in Red Lodge, MT where a friend of mine from Cornell, Peter Crist, and lives and owns a restaurant called Bridge Creek Backcountry Kitchen and Wine Bar (excellent story behind the name, you should go to their website for details). We hadn't thought that we weren't going to get to go through Red Lodge so we were excited to get to stop at the restaurant and see Peter and have a yummy lunch. We forgot to take a picture-very dumb! It was so great to see Peter after 20+ years and to catch up with all of the great things that he has done since we graduated. If you ever find yourself in Red Lodge make sure to stop by, say hi and have a great meal!

After our lunch we hit the Candy Emporium and then hit the road. Peter had told us that it's a 14 hour drive to Minneapolis where we planned to visit our friends Amanda and Greg (see previous post in Jackson Hole) but, because its so far, we had planned to stop for the night at a campground in North Dakota. But, for some reason, I looked at the map at about 9:30 and calculated that it was about 350 miles from where we were. Driving 80 (speed limit is 75 in North Dakota) that should take about 4 hours, right? So we thought, why not? Lets just drive there tonight. The audiobook is great and the kids are asleep so lets do it. Well, I clearly cannot do math and did not calculate what Peter said about 14 hours. We arrived at 6 am, just as Amanda's husband Greg was getting ready to go to work. We had a no gas scare in tiny Oksana, ND at 5 am but luckily, found a gas station that lets you pump gas even when they're closed. 

We said hi to Amanda and Greg and went to bed.

Day 15

The next morning Chris woke us all up really early (5:50) so that we could, happily, cheerfully and without argument, get in to the car to drive to the Lamar Valley where we had our best chance of seeing the grizzly bears and wolves that are so famous in Yellowstone. We saw a black bear almost immediately and I took a terrible picture:

He was just snuffling along in the high grass eating berries and whatever, didn't even notice us taking pictures! He was very cute, from a distance. When he started walking towards us Max wanted to hang out and meet him up close, but I dragged him back to the car (in his shark pj's, of course). After all, Yellowstone has rules; stay 50 yards way from a black bear, 100 yards from a Grizzly, don't make elk calls (Chris had trouble following that one), etc.

We also saw a Grizzly bear from about a million miles away. There was a group of people at a pullout with these serious scopes who were all excited so we stopped. They were (retired) people who go into the park every day to watch the bears so they know all of their names, ages and stats. They let us use their scope and told us all about Scarface who is a 24 year old Grizzly with a collar who likes to walk miles around the park every day. It was so, so cool to see him, even if he was so far away. 

We came upon one of the huge herds of bison who were meandering around the fields and the roads, just hanging out. A few of the younger bison wrestled in the middle of the road for quite awhile completely oblivious to the cars and people. They appeared to be shocked when they noticed the cars! Not the smartest animals in park.

There are elk everywhere, one especially large guy who liked to hang out near the Canyon campground where we stayed. He created quite a few traffic jams. 

We didn't get to see the wolves, unfortunately. We came upon a group of wolf watchers (same thing as the bear watchers. I owner if there's competition between the groups?). Anyway, they were packing up their scopes and told us that the wolves and their 9 puppies had been playing in the field for the last hour, but had just gone behind a hill and didn't appear to be coming back. Rats.

Max had an eagle eye and saw a coyote running along the hill next to the road and we followed it for a few miles, that was pretty neat. We also saw loads of crows (yuck), a Bald Eagle, black tipped deer and regular deer everywhere. Emma commented that it's pretty funny when seeing a bison on the side of the road feels like a normal occurrence.

We went back to the campsite feeling like we had already had a full day (it was 11 am) and cooked some brunch on the stove (thanks Rachek family, it's an awesome camp stove!). The kids wanted to hang out and nap, but we pointed out that, while they may someday have the chance to get back to Yellowstone we are getting old and are probably not going to get back there so naps were out of the question. We dragged them back to the car and went to see the Canyon Falls. It was an easy walk down to the bottom and the falls are more than impressive (and kind of scary). These falls are actually higher than Niagara Falls and spill more water over the falls every day. My pictures don't do it justice at all:

The walk back up was interesting. Its amazing what a little altitude will do…

Then we headed to Mammoth Falls specifically because we wanted access to the internet so that we could download the second book in our trilogy! I sat in the bar area of the restaurant for an hour of internet access (that I paid for) and it still wouldn't download more than 1/4 of the book. We had a yummy dinner instead in the dining room and then got a chance to see the elk herd that lives in the town. Apparently they wander around town all the time, unconcerned with the cars and people. The bison do it too. Definitely have to watch where you walk in Mammoth Falls!

We were too tired for S'mores again that night, but had a good nights sleep instead.