Utah or Bust!

After our airport adventures coming back from Hawaii last month, I'd decided that we'd forgo airports for a while. Since we have a wedding and a triathlon to go to in Utah next weekend, I decided to DRIVE the 20+ hours with Quinton and enjoy the scenery.

Lucky for me, I found a cheap Southwest ticket, at the VERY last minute, for my mom to fly out to Chicago and make the drive with us. It was a huge blessing to have her with us since it meant I could run into the bathroom without always having to park the car and take Quinton in, plus she provided endless entertainment to Quinton!

Thanks for coming, Mom!

Quinton, my mom and I set out on Thursday morning and made it to Grand Island, Nebraska the first day. I'd booked a hotel online for our stay and it had pretty good reviews but when we arrived and checked in, the roomy was s-t-i-n-k-y! My mom went to check and see if we could switch rooms but the room they were going to switch us to was just as stinky so we stayed put. I can't really describe the smell except that it was just plain old unpleasant!

In the morning, we noticed this cute pond out back off a nice deck so my mom and Quinton snagged some continental breakfast toast and fed it to the ducks.

One highlight of our first day of driving was when we turned off of the highway to go to our motel and the corn fields we were passing looked like they were glowing! There were so many lightning bugs! More than I had ever seen in my life! At one point, we pulled over and turned off the headlights to watch all of them...it was so amazing!

Quinton loves to be a helper so here he is "helping" to wash the windshield.
More help...
If you ask Quinton, this was probably the highlight of his participation of the trip! It got a good chuckle from several truckers walking past!

If nothing else, on a road trip, you have to keep your sense of humor. Quinton is good at that! Here he is giving Grandma a noogie!

Quinton needed to stretch his legs on the second day so we stopped at a Cabela's and walked around discovering all of the "mounted" animals in the store and admiring their giant aquariums with river fish in them. Kind of an odd place to have a field trip but it worked. Quinton was ready to get back in the car after an hour at Cabelas!

We made it to my sister, Jessi's, house in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday. It was so nice to pull into her driveway! Overall, it was a great road trip and blessedly uneventful! We'll see how it goes when I get to drive back to Chicago by myself in a week or two!