Yellowstone and Beyond!

Hello all! It has been awhile. We have gone non-stop for the last 3 days with hardly any time to stop and blog. We hit Yellowstone running on Sunday and Monday. We then traveled to Sheridan Wyoming on Monday night. THAT was a very stressful drive through the mountains. We avoided many, many deere, and in Wyoming they have open ranges so you are driving along, round a corner, and there is a HUGE herd of cows in the road that you have to creep through. It was amazing but a very stressful drive, the mileage was about 90 miles but going through the mountains at 25 mph hair pin curves, avoiding deere, and cows, it took us about 4 hours. We stopped for the night last night, got into our hotel around 10:30. We were very thankful to have gotten thru the Big Horn Mountains! At one point Haley was talking non-stop,(big surpise), and Jeff said, "Haley, could you stop talking, this drive is very stressful and kind of scary." She said, "Well, let's just pray about this!!!" And she went into a cute little 4 year old prayer for protection. I had to think that God was smiling down on our van as she was praying, and although I was praying all along, he gave us extra angels through those mountains because of her child-like faith!

We were going to come all the way home today (Tues.) but because we made such terrible time yesterday we decided we would never get from Sheridan, Wyoming to home in one day. We are right now in Mitchell, S.D. We will return home tomorrow afternoon and we are ready to get there. The girls have a list of all the home cooked meals I am to make for them. Mikayla, who could eat out about every single meal, said, "we aren't eating out for a year!!" I am just including a few pictures tonight but will give more day to day details and pictures tomorrow night at home. Blogger is doing something weird and these aren't necessarily the pics that I had chosen but for some reason it chose these and since it is 11 p.m. I am not going to try and fix it. Check back in tomorrow night!

A stop at Kettle River!

Hi everyone- we are back in the states now. We left the Lawrence's house around 10 yesterday(Friday) morning. We traveled about 5 hrs. to Colville, Washington, back to the hotel that we had stayed at on our way to Canada. I wanted to share a few pictures of our family and the Lawrence family off of their balcony. You can see the mountains in the backgroung and the lake is below the trees. They truely live in a beautiful area. The other pictures on the collage is an area that we just stumbled upon. We were on the way to Colville and all of a sudden Jeff pulls over off to the side of the road. It scared me to death b/c I was sleeping. He said, "Look! That is so beautiful down there, let's climb down there into that river." We found out later that the river was the Kettle River and it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been too. Look at the very middle picture!(Lanaya- you probably remember this river!) We climbed and hiked over the rocks, to beautiful sandy bars with water so clear you could see to the bottom. The younger girls made no bones about peeling off their clothes and jumping right in! Jeff and Jenna as they were exploring farther along the beach and climbing across more rocks saw a BEAR PAW PRINT!!! They quickly hightailed it back to us. We really can imagine a bear going into the middle, standing on the rocks and scooping up the fish as they float by. For the most part this was a high point on our trip! Mikayla and Haley were throwing rocks into the water and Mik accidently nailed Jeff right in the back of the head. I thought he was going to pass out! He was in terrible pain, and Mikayla was crying b/c she felt so bad and I was watching out for bears! At that point we decided to climb back up and head to the van. We did dig a huge rock out of the stream and bring it home with us as a memento. The girls are holding it in the picture, it is reddish brownish, very pretty.

Today we left Colville around 10 and arrived in Missoula, Montana.(University of Montana is here) We checked into our hotel and then got some supper. Leah, there is a TJ Maxx here so we stopped in there to see if we could find that same back pack and we did but Jenna didn't really like it. I bought a backpack for Mik and Haley, Jeff bought a shirt and I bought and skirt and a pair of capri's. And all we went in for was a backpack for Jenna. She is going to keep looking.

The girls are swimming now and then we will head up to our room to sleep. We have to be up and out early so we can get to Yellowstone tomorrow with plenty of time to see things. We will stay all night there tomorrow night, do some more sight-seeing on Monday a.m. and then begin our journey home. We are going to try and get 18 hrs. between Mon. afternoon and Tues. so we can get home Tues. evening. We are just having an absolutely wonderful time, but are ready to get back to normalicy of life in our own home. I should go, the girls are done swimming. I will post more tomorrow night of Yellowstone. Thanks for reading!

Last Day in B.C.- Thursday

Today is our last day in British Columbia. We will leave tomorrow morning around 9 or 10 and head back to Colville, Washington. Our next stop will be Yellowstone National Park. I probably won't blog until we get there, which will be on Sat. But what did we do our last day in B.C. you ask? Really not much. The kids didn't leave the house until supper time. Jeff, Jenna and I went to Wal-Mart to refill out snack bag and cooler with drinks for the trip. I then found a really nice kitchen gadget store. Carri and I had been discussing that she needed a "cherry pitter" because cherries are in abundance here. They pick them from their neighbors tree. Anyway, she hadn't heard of one before. So I found a really nice one for her at the store and bought it for her for an early birthday present. Later in the day Carri, Jenna and I went to the Craft and Farmers Market. We bought more cherries to pit!



All week we had seen a Red Robin sign and we wondered if it is the same Red Robin restaurant as in the states. So we decided to take them their for supper and see if it was. It was! So the tradition continues, we passed on our love of Red Robin to another family. They really enjoyed it.

Top picture: Haley and Jeff snooze together on the couch this afternoon.

Eating ice-cream at the mall after our huge supper at Red Robin.

Pictures of the beach on Wed. in Kelowna

Pic. #1-Haley and Matt both suck their blankets when they are tired! We have never been able to find another child that does this, we have found one! They look so cute. Pic. # 3- Jeff tries to take a nap while Haley and Mikki bury his legs in the sand. I am sorry these pics are so small, it is hard to see them, but I couldn't get them any bigger. Double clicking helps, but not much.

Wednesday in Kelowna, British Columbia

We had another wonderful day in Kelowna, B.C. Carri went and exercised this morning, MINUS ME! I decided I did not want to be sore for the rest of the trip so I would opt out. We all went to the beach again today. While the kids and men swam, Carri and I snuck off for about an hour and walked along the beach down to some shops. I bought a few momentos. We then made our way back to the beach and we all ate a picnic lunch. About 50 yards away from the beach is a large splash park that the kids enjoyed too. Everyone got sunburned today after being in the sun for about 4 hours. We then went home and grilled steak for supper. It was a great day. Tomorrow is our last day here, so we are feeling like we have lots of conversations to have yet, and lots of things we would like to do in this beautiful city, but with only one more day we won't get all the talks out or get to do all we want. There is just never enough time with friends...

Beautiful Tuesday evening in Kelowna

Today was a beautiful day in Kelowna. Ray was at home sick in bed, but the rest of us went to a movie. Everyone went to Ratitoulle, but Jenna and I went to Hairspray. I really enjoyed it! and so did Jenna but there were some innuendo's that went over Jenna's head. She wants to buy it but I don't think we will, because someday she will figure out the innuendos. I agree with my sister in that it was a Chick-Flick. Jeff would have been bored to tears with all the singing. Haley and Mikki would have liked it.

The adults had originally planned to take a cruise on the Okanagan River tonight on a huge yacht, but Ray really didn't feel up to boat movement so we cancelled that. He did feel somewhat better so we kept the babysitter and we went out to dinner and then walked downtown along the river. It is absolutley beautiful!!!! (as you can see by the pictures)

We had a wonderful time and the kids did great with the babysitter and were sound asleep when we came home. You can't get more wonderful than that!

Monday in Kelowna

I was not able to blog yesterday, and my sister, Leah, tried to tell me via email how to change the date stamp, but I couldn't get it to change. She knows my password so maybe she'll just go in and change it for me! (wink, wink) :)

What do you know... the best sister in the whole wide world snuck in here and fixed the date!-thanks Leah!!!!

We had a wonderful day in Kelowna (pronounced Kalona, for you Iowa people) . Carri conned me into going to an exercise class with her. She went on and on about how it was in a park surrounded by the mountains and it was beautiful. She failed to mention that the name was Bikini Boot Camp. 2 things: I will never be in a bikini and anything named "Boot Camp" cannot be good! She also failed to mention that you can't enjoy the mountains because you are so busy grabbing your knees and huffing and puffing and trying to suck in oxygen. At one point the instruction said, "I know you are lacking oxygen right now, that is called 'Anaroebic'. It is good for you, let's do that again!" I thought I would die and I kept saying to myself, why am I doing this on my vacation!?? I am soooo sore now. I have already told Carri I will not be going with her on Wed. b/c I do not want to be sore the rest of my vacation. Jenna went with us too and did awesome!! She is sore also today. After we left boot camp Carri took us to Starbucks and we got a non-fat caramel dolce latte espresso.(or whatever it was called)

When we returned home we loaded the kids up and took them to the beach. It was a beautiful day for that. We spent a couple hours there and then came home for naps. The kids have all been quite tired from lack of sleep.

The rest of the evening we spent hanging out. In early evening I suggested that maybe we should let the kids go swimming in their little kids pool and Ray said, "Yeah, I've been refilling it." And he went and checked on it. Well the hose had slipped out of the pool, and to make a really long story short, the hose directed itself to their foundation,filled up a window well type thing and we spent the next hour using pails to empty the window well and cleaning out their basement that had about 1 inch of standing water!

For those of you that know the history of our family vacations, you know that we either tend to have at least one person sick, or end up with someone in the hospital. Well, we woke up this morning and found out that Ray was sick with the stomach flu and throwing up all night. So you know what that means...

I need to go, I'm feeling a little queasy.

Beach pictures.

Jeff & Jenna enjoy the zip cord that drops you into Lake Okanagon today.


Sand castle with a moat and bridge, it caved in soon after this picture was taken.

Haley buries Jeff. Notice the goldfish crackers on his chest. We put them there because there were lots of seagulls around hunting for food and we were tempting them to land on Jeff's chest and get one. I had my camera ready and they were circling, but they never landed. Jeff was not happy with us.

Sunday in Kelowna, BC

The kids eat ice-cream at DQ. You can see Ray and Carri in the background.

We had a great day today in Kelowna. We went to church this morning. They attend a large church called Trinity Baptist Church. It was a wonderful service. One of their church members does Xtreme Bike stunts and they showed him on the screen doing all his stunts like back flips in mid air and then lands back on his motorcycle. He will probably be at the next Olympics as a side entertainment type thing, his name is Drew (?). It was pretty cool, then he rode his motorcycle on the stage!, and they interviewed him. The pastor came out later and he had the motorcycle and also a lazy boy out on the stage with him. He talked about how we could choose our life style for God. We could sit in the lazy chair or we could be adventurous and follow God's call. It was an awesome sermon!

After church we came home and ate lunch and then went to the park. And then to DQ. After that we went home and rested for awhile and then had supper. The kids played outside. It is now 10:00 BC time and we can't get them to go to sleep. We put them to bed at 8!!! It will be an interesting day tomorrow with tired children!

Jeff and Murphy relax.

chicks dig pink!

The girls pose with Jeff because he is wearing the shirt they got him for Father's Day.

Ray and the girls and Sheyanne play at the Water park. It gets so hot in Kelowna that they put splash parks in their public parks.

Matthew on the teeter totter.

Ray and Jeff shoot the breeze at the park.





Mikayla and Haley pose on their way down the slide at the park in Kelowana.

It gets so hot in Kelowna that they have splash parks in their parks.

Scenery from BC

OH CANADA, OH CANADA!!!

We made it!!! We arrived in Kelowna, Canada! It was a drive of 2, 165 miles!!! We arrived at Ray and Carri, Cheyanne and Matthew's house about 3 p.m. today.

We stopped last night and slept in Colville, Washington, about an hour from the Canadian border. It is a good thing we had made reservations because the front desk lady said that the whole town was sold out. Who knew that upstate Washington, in the middle of NOWHERE, would be so popular.

Today it was a beautiful drive through the mountains, but we are thrilled to be stationary for a week. I will post pictures tomorrow night. I have no exciting pictures because we have only traveled the past 2 days. Kelowna is absolutley beautiful and we are excited to explore it. Tomorrow we will go to church with them, and then do some sightseeing. Check back in for more excitement! :) I know that some of you check every day, sometimes 2 and 3 times a day for the latest update! Sometimes at 3AM (MOM!). I will try to blog every day this week. That's all for now!

Thursday July 19th...this morning we left The Black Hills of SD around 7:30 a.m. and arrived in Helena, Montana around 7:30 p.m. We calculated that after gas and bathroom breaks and lunch and dinner we drove about 10 hrs. The girls did sooo good. They enjoyed the scenery and everytime Haley looked out the window she would say, "there's those snow-topped mountains again!" Jenna said, "we traveled 10 hrs!, that was a piece of cake!" Like I said, they did great. We did stop by Crazy Horse Memorial, and The Battle of Little Big Horn. We tried to explain the history as best we could but once again it was over their heads. We travel 6 hrs. tomorrow and then 4 hrs. on SAt. and we will arrive in Kelowna, British Columbia!!! Yeah!! I will update more later!!!

Wednesday July 18th...Howdy folks! We woke up this morning and went to eat a huge Cowboy Breakfast at our ranch. Boy, was it good! We then took the scenic route through Custer National Park to eventually end up at Mount Rushmore. The girls really liked that. Jeff and I would have really liked to take more time and just learn a lot of history but you can't with 3 young girls. When we went inside the museum Haley just wanted to go back outside and "see those 4 faces again". The scenic route was gorgeous. We could see the Monument from on top of an adjoining mountain, peeking through the stone cliffs. We could get out and walk amoung the cliffs. It was breath taking. During the scenic drive we found our buffalo!!! We drove through the Wildlife Loop of Custer Natl Park and came upon herds of hundreds of buffalo. It was really neat! After that we started back to our cabin and came into a HUGE rain storm, sounds like you had it in Iowa too. There was golf ball size hail and we thought for sure our windshield was going to break with us in the van. We tried to shelter ourselves under a tree but it didn't help much. We received quite a few dents from the hail! When we arrived back to our cabin it had rained so hard that the sky light was leaking, all over the bed! They brought more bedding, and although it rained more, it didn't leak again. They said they hadn't rained it about 3 months there! After the rain slowed down we went "panning for gold" at Wades Gold Mine. A family that owns a "claim" will teach you to pan for gold. They guarantee pieces of gold (flecks). I think Mikayla found 8 and the other 2 got 6 or 7. It was really enjoyable!! That night we went to Circle B Chuckwagon Dinner. It was a Cowboy dinner and show. The food was awesome! The girls enjoyed pretending to lasso and I bought the girls cowgirl hats.

Vacation day 3, 4 and 5!

Hello faithful blog readers! We are back in civilization so we can share our journey. I will be updating for you tonight the last 3 days of our vacation. The reason I couldn't post was because we were in the hills of SD, in the Black Hills. We stayed at "High Country Guest Ranch" for 2 nights, Tues. and Wed. night. It was out in the middle of nowhere and our cabin (pictured in the colage) had no internet service, no phone service (or cell phone connection) and no t.v. Ya know- believe it or not- we had a great time! There were many adventures that I will write about. I will go day by day.

Tuesday the 17th. ..We had stayed all night in Wall, SD on Monday night and then got up Tues. and went to the "famous" Wall Drug that they advertise in South Africa and even in Iraq. We were sorely disappointed! I guess we were expecting so much more, or maybe less, it was way too commercialized. If you ever get a chance to go there, don't. It's not worth the trip or time. After spending awhile there we traveled to the Black Hills and got to Hill City, SD. This is where we stayed at the guest ranch. Our cabin was nice but like I said it was pretty secluded. There were lots of horses on the ranch in coral and Mikayla especially LOVED riding "Dan" the pony! We could just go and get him from the barn and lead him around any time we wanted. Outside our cabin there was a hot tub and it was beautiful with the Black Hills to look at. Also on this day Jeff, Mikayla and Jenna rode up the side of a mountain on a chairlift and the got to alpine slide back down again. We also went to Bear Country USA a drive through wild life park. There were all kinds of animals but we especially loved all the bears. There were so many of them, really close to our car.

Vacation-day 2, Mitchell SD, and the Badlands

Hello all from the Corn Palace! We had a wonderful day. We went to the Corn Palace this morning and overall were pretty disappointed. I remember going as a child and thinking it was really cool, but somehow it is not the same. Jenna wasn't that impressed either, the other 2 were along for the ride and interested in the "Corn-cession Stand." (really, that's what its called.) After the Corn Palace we got on the road to travel the 2 hrs. to the Badlands. We stopped and had a picnic lunch at a rest area. It was very nice.

Before we reached the Badlands we came upon an historical Prairie Home. All the Original Buildings so we took a tour of that, I snapped lots of pictures because we talk alot about immigration in my class and that will really fit in.

We were WOWED by the Badlands and very very much enjoyed them. It did a little hiking in the 109 degree temps, boy were the girls faces red from the heat. Although it was so hot, we couldn't just drive through the Badlands we had to "experience" them. We saw a fox and lots of praire dogs. We fed the prairie dogs cheez-its!

After spending most of the day at the Badlands, we traveled to Wall, SD. The home of Wall Drug. The town of Wall is a dive, and we chose a restaurant that looked pretty good, it was called Cactus Cafe and it was advertised quite a bit. It was awful! We went back to our hotel and went swimming and right now we are getting the girls tucked into bed. We were up quite late last night. It is 9:03 SD time, which is 10:03 Ia time so I guess it is not that early!

Tomorrow we are going to go downtown Wall and go through Wall Drug. Then we are heading to Mount Rushmore.

We still have not seen any buffalo. I thought I saw one way off in the distance but wasn't sure, so we can't count that. We are keeping track of all the liscence plates we see and we have about 28 so far.

Enjoy the pics of the Corn Palace and of the Badlands.

Family Vacation- Day 1

Well, here we are in Mitchell, South Dakota, about 7 hours into our journey. The girls did well, we left our house at 12:45 today and stopped about 15 mins. later to go through the BK Drive-Thru. We traveled about 3.5 hours and got gas and went to the bathroom. We then travelled all the way (about 4 more hrs.) to our first destination. We ate supper once we got to Mitchell, a run down Bonanza, but it was the first restaurant we came to and we were all STARVING. We arrived in town about 7:00, ate, and then we all swam at the hotel. Our first sight-seeing event is tomorrow, The Corn Palace! We will have lots of pictures to share. As soon as we crossed the state line from Minnesota to SD we expected to see Buffalo but our search still continues. Stay tuned!

Lots of pictures

double click on the pictures to see them up close.

Remember to go to Church Multiplication Association website to check out the article on our family. Go to my LINKS section to find it easily.

Hi everyone- I have spent the last 2 days in class so I don't have any news. We leave on our trip on Sunday. I will be updating my blog with pics every night or so, so be sure to check back in. Today I wanted to include some misc. pics for you to enjoy.

top left: Haley and Mikayla decided that they were going to take a bath and relax after a "hard" day. They wanted to use my face mask. You can't see it but they have their feet up on the edge of the tub relaxing. Mikayla wanted to put cucumbers on her eyes but we didn't have any. Where do they get this stuff?

middle: somehow a game of Candyland ended up in a pig pile.

top right: all 3 girls show off their certificates to show they passed their swimming lessons. Jenna's teacher commented that Jenna's 50 meter breast stroke was the best in the class. She is a very fast swimmer!

middle left: The girls wanted glasses to wear to match Jenna with her new glasses. We were at grandma's house and grandma whipped out her last 2 pair of glasses that she wore eons ago.

middle: Jenna and G & G after her baptism.

middle right: Haley jumps to Jeff in the pool.

bottom left: Haley was taking a nap in my bed. I told Mikki to go wake her up so she did. After awhile we realized that she wasn't coming out into the living room so we investigated. She had gotten out of the bed, gotten into the hallway, laid down and fell back asleep.

middle: Jenna and Mikki "spidering" on the swing in the backyard.

bottom right: Our cute Haley.

I Dare You!

Well, in my sister's blog (4hawkeyefans@blogspot.com) she dared anyone to post their messiest cupboard, room etc. and show a before and after picture. I chose Mikayla and Haley's room. It is ALWAYS in disarray. They spend a lot of time in it, and they just can't keep it clean. If I tell them to clean it up, they just kind of make piles here and there. Even if they have plenty of storage. Well, I decided that we were going to get down to the nitty gritty and clean and pitch stuff. After many tears we got it done. Haley did not want to get rid of her 3 ziploc bags of ...rocks! She thought they were all just so special. When she wasn't looking I handed them all to Jenna and mouthed, "get rid of these!" Haley hasn't missed them! It took us about 2 hours, but we got it done.