Wow, I haven't posted for a long time! Well, we are back, for those of you who didn't know it. We were gone for 3 whole weeks! Our vacation was soooo much fun! I'm not going to go into all the little details (that would take forever!), but I'll do a brief post on it. The first day, we got up at an ungodly hour (3:30 am) and got on the road. We drove pretty much all day that first day. Nothing much happened. We got to a KOA (Kampground of America) in Williams, AZ @ around 6. Next day we saw the Grand Canyon...so amazing! That is something that everyone should see in their lifetime! We stayed @ a KOA in Holbrook, AZ that night. Next day we drove through NM. Wednesday we got to a friends house (the Gribacs) in McKinney, TX @ about 8. We stayed there through Friday. Saturday morning we left early to go to my mom's friends (the Cartwrights) house. The story of how we know them is long...in short, this was the first time any of us has met any of them. They live in West Fork, AR. They have 4 kids. We stayed Saturday night with them, and left early Sunday morning to go to church with my dad's cousins at Calvary Chapel in the Ozarks (yes, that is what it was called). That was in Rogers, AR. We were planning to meet my dad's cousin Linda and her family there, but when we got there, my dad's other cousin, Donna and her family were there too. Paige, Bailey and Laine have been writing to her daughters, Sarah (who's 12), Libby (10), and Erin (7). Their older brother Steven was there too. He's 15, and he came to CA one time like 4 years ago, so it was fun to see him again. Also there was Libby's twin brother Sam. Linda and her family were there too. I got to meet my cousin Lydia, who is 16. We went to my Uncle Burl's and Aunt Oleta's house. (Just a thought, if you're confused, it's nothing compared to what I was when I was there! To quote my cousin Lydia "you know you have a crazy family when you take vacation and keep on meeting family members that you didn't have a clue you had!" I completely agree with her!) Anyway, we all hung out at my aunt and uncle's (actually, great aunt and uncle's) house all afternoon. I hung out with Steven mostly. It was fun. We played frisbee out in the backyard...which was pretty amusing...Steven went into the bushes when the frisbee went over my head about 20 times (okay okay, not 20, more like 3), and all the kids who play guitar (Steven, me, Lydia, Paige and Sarah) all gathered in the back bedroom to play Steven's brand new electric guitar for a while. We had a lot of fun. We stayed @ my great-aunt and uncle's house for a couple days, and was I bored! Mostly I just sat on their couch and played electronic Yahtzee. My Great-Aunt Oleta told my Granny after we left that I never smile. Well, I was bored...I had nothing to smile about! When we left their house, we went to my dad's friends house (the Knox's) in Sparta, MO, which is right near Springfield, where Steven and his siblings live, so we got to visit them again (although Steven wasn't home, so I was bored). Also resident to Springfield, Missouri, is Bass Pro Shops! How fun, right? Haha, not! Thank goodness, we got to go with Steven & his siblings, so mostly Steven and I just talked. We had plenty of opportunity, because we had to be "buddies" (everybody had one). We made a huge joke out of it. It was a lot of fun. Funny, my dad made the whole family wear our Bass Pro t-shirts to church the first Sunday we were back. After MO, we drove up through a whole bunch of states, which I can't even name in the right order, so I'll just skip that part. Besides, all we did was drive anyway. Did I mention our main destination was Idaho. Oh, on the way we visited Mt. Rushmore, which my dad made us do a report on, so I now know way more than necessary about a huge slab of rock. So if you need to know something about Mt. Rushmore, you know who to ask, right? Once we got to Idaho, we went tubing almost immediately. The boys (poor guys) had been preparing the tube and boat and everything, and spent almost all day getting stuff ready to go boating with us, and then we were like 2 hours late, so they had to wait around for us to get there! We felt so bad. We (Jared, David, Paige and I) went with Grandpa Chuck (I've always called him that) on the little boat to go tubing. Jared drove. David and Paige wouldn't let him do anything, so when I got on I told him he could do whatever he wanted, which probably wasn't smart, but it was fun! He flung me (still on the tube) about 4 feet off of the water multiple times. It was crazy, but I had a blast! (almost literally) We had a lot of fun with them. The night before we left, we all stayed up til 11:30 playing poker in the living room of Auntie's cabin. We had to get up @ like 4 to leave for CA. We drove all day, and stayed the night at a KOA in Shasta, CA. We got to Modesto for my great grandma's 90th birthday party @ like 2 pm on Saturday the 16th. We were completely exhausted, so we didn't stay for very long. Pretty much only enough to eat a piece of cake and take a whole bunch of pictures with Mimi. We went home (our house was spotless!) and unloaded all our stuff out of and off of the car (then the house was a mess!) and crashed. I spent a couple hours playing my guitar (I wasn't able to take it, so I missed it a lot!) and then another couple hours knitting (I missed that too!) and watching the Olympics. We continued our habit of 3 weeks of not going to bed before midnight for another week while we stayed up watching the Olympics. (Why, may I ask, do they have to play the women's gymnastics, diving and volleyball all in the 10 pm-12 am hours? It's not right.) Need I say that I have still not caught up on my sleep? Wow, this was not as brief a post as I had planned. Oh, well, I guess it takes a few paragraphs to sum up 3 weeks out of state, right? Hopefully you're not bored out of your mind after reading that...
