Road Trip: Denver and Driving....

You all.  Getting back home from a road trip vacation is hard.

 The laundry!  The unpacking!  The time change!  The inability to function when we find ourselves with 8 extra hours a day to be spent NOT driving!  The whining and wheedling of children who have forgotten how to do chores, or piano, or really meet any expectations at all other than "sit in a booster seat in a car!"  Oh my. We may need to leave again.

Thankfully we have the Olympics to distract us.  And the International Yo-yo Competition. And beautiful weather and lots of shopping to do on "tax free weekend".  So we will be OK.

In the meantime, a recap of the last 5 days of our trip.

We drove to Denver on Sunday, via a stop at a few of our favorite places in Cheyenne:
Sierra Trading Post, of course (new running shoes and new socks!  yay!) and the Children's Garden.  We keep thinking the kids may be too old for this magical place.  Luckily, they aren't yet.  Hopefully, they never will be.  I mean, I still have a blast playing with the water wheel/pump station.  And those chimes!  It is always a relaxing respite.

Here are the kids playing blissfully together, creating dams.  Mere seconds later, they were fighting and Ivy was whining.  This has since become the normal interaction for the two of them.  "Extreme Road Trip Sibling Intoerance," I call it.

We arrived in time for dinner at the lovely home of Nat's cousin Ashley, and Ivy fell in with her second cousins (7 year old Riley and 4 year old Ella) like they'd been together yesterday. They played house together, complete with some very realistic "fake crying"..  Those girls were a hoot! Jack kept himself content with Pokemon and king of theives, while we enjoyed some time to chat with the very busy Ashley and Mike.  A highlight of the stay was getting to tour their almost-complete new home, complete with a swim in the beautiful, mountain-view lake in their new neighborhood.  What a treat! 

For all the fun we had, this is somehow the only picture we got of the second cousins together!  We were NOT on top of our game, I guess.  Riley and Ivy desperately wanted to have a "sleepover" but it turns out that our little girl likes to sleep in the same room as a family member.  She told me," When I am with you or daddy or Jack, all the darkness goes away but when I am with someone else it doesn't!"  Little girl, you can always come in with me to make the darkness go away...

On our second day in Denver we took a drive up to Boulder.  The city has grown in the 15 years since we were there last-- but the Pearl Street area, the historic housing, and the mountain view remain as picture-perfect as ever.  We had a fun meetup with friends from Cleveland-- Ivy's friend from school has been on a five (!) week road trip as well, and our timing lined up!  We enjoyed lunch and wandering with our friends as the girls hugged and giggled...

V.  is rocking her Team Boulevard shirt in Boulder! :)

Day 3 in Denver-- Why NOT go to Ikea for breakfast??

Then, off to Leigh's house for a great, relaxing day with her family.  Leigh always has a special place to show us.  This time, we went to a local park with a wonderful swimming hole and beach in a mountain creek.

Magical.

We spent a great deal of time creating this partial dam, playing with heavy rocks and water current until out arms ached.

Post-creek babies snuggled in for TV in Leigh's wonderful, cozy living room.  Just love spending time with my friend here!

This is how our kids sleep on a road trip... We are so glad we brought their blankets from home.  I really think it helped ease the transition from bed to bed each night...

And, Wednesday morning... We're off!  Headed east for home.... Our first day was a brutal 15 hours of travel, taking us out of Colorado (goodbye mountains!), and across the entirety of Kansas and most of Missouri.

We did take the time for one scenic stop, to save our sanity.  And I am so glad we did!  We detoured off of I-70 to find Lucas, Kansas, a town of 438 that is the self-proclaimed "Grass Roots Art Capital of the world".  Grass Roots Art is apparently code for "really strange s**t put together in random ways.  It was perfect.

First stop-- the public toilet. In a building shaped like a toilet tank with a bowl-shaped plaza in front and a concrete toilet paper roll off to the side.  And these murals inside:

We had lunch in what appeared to be the ONLY functioning restaurant in town (which we found just in time, as it was melting-hot outside..)  where our waitress regaled us with her torrid tale of the love, loss, 6 misbehaving children, 2 ex husbands, 2 years of soul searching and 2 house fires that brought her to Lucas, Kansas.  You just never know what what you're going to get when you ask, "So what brings you here?"....

Next "stop within a stop"-- the "Garden of Eden" concrete sculptures and the "Worlds Largest Exhibit of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things."    Need I say more?  I could not have designed a better roadside attraction, ever.  Totally worth the time to stop...

One more short stop in Kansas City-- a drive by of a Frank Lloyd Wright - designed church and an attempt to view a (very) private FLW home...and a successful stop at this totally awesome playground before dinner.

We spent exactly 7 hours in our hotel room in St. Louis, rolling in with 2 sleeping kids and 2 almost-sleeping adults just before midnight, and leaving at 7am to beat St. Louis traffic.  Ivy never even saw the room, carried to and from it sound asleep, wrapped in her blanket.  My girl loves her sleep...
We attempted a stop at the St. Louis Arch but were foiled by construction so we gazed at it from a distance and enjoyed a glittery-water view of the morning Mississippi before driving our tails off to get HOME.  Lunch in Indianapolis (well, just outside as we could not get parking for the downtown Chick-Fil-A due to Gen Con being in town that day..), some traffic detouring in Columbus-- and we were to Lakewood for dinner by 7pm.  Phew.

We may be recovering from this one for a while....

Now, to work on the photo book!