the long drive.

I can't let go of the summer.

After Nauvoo, we stopped in St. Louis and did the zoo.

Which wore Joey out.

Then we stopped in Omaha to catch a movie (Despicable Me) and eat good food from Brewburgers...a Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives feature. (When I die I want Conan to drive me across the country in an RV so I can eat everything I've ever seen on this show) I ate this:

Those are french fries drowning in Alfredo sauce, with bacon and chives.
I dream about them at night.

Then we headed to Mount Rushmore. and ate awesome ice cream.

Conan couldn't go with us all the way because of work, so we dropped him off in Great Falls to fly home (boohoo) and drove the rest of the way el solo. Just me and my GPS, who accidentally on purpose told me to take the wrong turn so we ended up driving an extra hour; no biggie. It was a beautiful mistake through the mountains. I kept stopping to take pictures like this:

And the kids would yell at me from the car to stop taking pictures and just take them to Canada already.
To which I'd reply...I brought you here and I can leave you here, so leave me and my camera alone!
To which they'd yell...You have 50 million pictures already! It's just a boring mountain!
And I...Someday you'll appreciate this mountain! You'll have this picture hanging in your living room! Stop yelling at me!
To which the nice biker couple snapping photos a couple feet away would reply...Oh, they grow up so fast. Enjoy them sweetie.
And so I offered to take their picture in front of the beautiful boring mountain so they could send it to their grandkids to hang on their wall. Which really irritated the van load of whiny kids.

Our destination was only 35 minutes away from the battle of click and shoot vs. adolescence. My home and native land, where we spent 2 1/2 weeks of cool weather bliss.

But this long winded post is about the drive, not the stay. Let's continue.

Now we go home, which was much faster. We didn't even stop at any of the other delicious drive-ins Conan mapped out because we were anxious to get home. A decision I now regret in my hungry state.

We met Conan in Great Falls, he admired our tans, pointed out my awesome Canadian accent I always pick up, we hugged like crazy, and drove.

When you have 5 kids who need to go 2 different kinds of potty 5 times a day for 4 days, that's 5x2x5x4, which equals a lot of this:

ew. public restrooms. I will say, I love those Xelerator hand dryers. You know, those ones that blow so hard the skin on your hands look all creepy and the kids cheeks blow up and look hilarious when they put their faces under them like they're not supposed? love 'em.

We stopped in Yellowstone:

right in time for those escaped convicts from Arizona to hide out there. We just barely escaped.

and in Wall South Dakota we stopped at a place called Wall Drug (they have 10 million signs all over the world with 9.8 million of them on the Interstate we stared at for 3 days), which was so completely unenjoyable because there were so many cool things to look at and eat and I loved it so much that Conan and I almost had a heart attack keeping track of the kids.

They had really great doughnuts. We love doughnuts.

So that's it. Let's end this trip with the doughnuts.

Whew. That took forever.