I mentioned that part of the reason I was taking a blog break was because of our family vacation…that vacation is, sadly, now over, and now it’s time for the reminisicing.  Oh, and the getting back to working.

I’m going to be posting about our vacation, and this is going to be some of that self-serving navel gazing that I’m sure some haters of personal blogs abhor.  I’m mostly doing this for me, and to share with remote family members, but anyone is welcome to come along on our Summer Vacation Extravaganza recap — you just have to remember that you’ve been warned that it might be boring. Especially because it’s probably going to take me about 2 weeks to do all of it:  we have almost 1300 pictures to get through.

Our vacation started on July 3rd.

The hardest part about going on vacation is leaving these two behind:

By this point, the suitcases have alerted the doggies to something of a foreboding nature, and their fears are being realized.  Their people are piling into this:

And are getting ready to leave.

Packing for a 2 week vacation and having that entire truckbed was like a miracle compared to previous trips, in which we crammed into my Honda Accord.  We had all kinds of stuff with us, and it was awesome.

The truck also rode pretty nicely with the weight in the back.

The boys spent a lot of the trip like this:

(That would be…plugged into one electronic device or another.  Playing games or watching movies or listening to music…).  They did also spend a lot of time reading, but the electronics made the 3770 miles in the truck much more bearable than any traveling I remember doing as a kid.  Plus, we don’t put up with the “are we there yet” questions:  we point at the GPS and the GPS tells them if we are there yet or not, and if not:  how much longer it’ll be.

Our first major stop was:

OK, not really, but it is where we ate for lunch that first day.  Don’t worry, I didn’t take pictures of all of the restaurants we ate at.  Just the first one.  We tried really hard to limit ourselves to ONE Fast Food restaurant per day.  ONE serving of french fries and ONE soft drink per day (and less if we could manage it).

Interestingly, of the fast food joints we did go to, McD’s was consistently the best in terms of customer service (fastest, best at getting our orders correct, etc…).  We had terrible luck at Wendy’s, Subway, Pizza Hut (which isn’t fast food, but still, it was horrible), and Burger King was OK, but McD’s always came through for us.

Our actual destination that day was in:

Mark’s Aunt and Uncle live north of Omaha, so we stopped to visit with them, and Mark’s cousin and her family.  (A family which grew by one baby girl 2 days after we were there.  We were hoping baby would have arrived BEFORE we did.  Oh well, we had a good time being entertained by baby’s big sister (who is all of 2 years old…).

Much of the time we were there was spent playing with rubber band guns of various sizes:

(Yes, that is a rubberband gun.  Ridiculous, isn’t it?)

Even the big kid got into the rubberband act.They also got to go outside and shoot balloons with BB guns.  Oh, and I think they used apples as targets, too.

When we left the next morning, we left behind rubberbands allover the place.  I felt badly, but Mark’s Aunt didn’t seem to mind — if we hadn’t left when we did, we might not have escaped (the boys would have gladly spent 2 weeks just shooting rubberbands…), plus she said it made her nostalgic for the days when her son was leaving rubberbands all over the house.  (Her son is the young man that just graduated from West Point).

So, that was Day 1 of our big adventure.  More tomorrow.