First Family Trip

So sorry that it has been awhile since I posted last. (and this post is a little long - sorry) We have been having a really fun summer though. I will post some more in the next few days or so to talk about some fun things. But for now...I wanted to talk about our first family trip! We had so much fun but it took a little longer to get there than expected.

We went to Lake Tahoe for the 4th of July with Spence's family. Our bro-in-law Mike's family has a house there and we love it. We've been there a few other times and it is so much fun to be able to go somewhere all together. We did miss grandma and grandpa Morris though :( - they weren't able to come with us. Anyway, we were planning on leaving Thursday morning and then I suddenly thought that we should just leave late Wednesday night and make it to Winemucca and stay overnight and then we could drive the rest of the way the next day and get there sooner. So... we ended up packing up the entire house - literally! I wish I would have taken a pic of the back of our car. But, the babies were never bored and had lots of familiar toys to play with. (at least that is what I kept telling myself as we took trip after trip out to the car to add "just one more thing.")

Well, we went to a gas station here to check tire pressure and it was broken so we decided to drive to Wendover and just check it there. We made it there about midnight and Spence started to check the tires and then it happened...

Two valves off of our tires just snapped as he put on the gauge and LONG story short - we had to take our spare which happened to be a "real tire" not a "doughnut" (thank goodness) and jack up the car and change one tire (the other one wasn't leaking after Macgyver, I mean Spencer, used his magic skills to fix it). So here we are at a Chevron at 12:30am in Wendover with our 3 sleeping babies in the back and then the jack gave! Seriously? I couldn't believe it. Here we are watching our car roll back slowly and all I'm thinking is, "please, please stop rolling!" Fortunately, we hadn't moved the spare and so the car rolled back onto it which stopped the axle from braking. SO... we ended up calling AAA (thanks dad for giving us that gift - love you!) and then came about 1:15am to help us with their monster jack since ours was now totally broken. You know, sometimes you just gotta laugh at what life gives you otherwise, you could end up really angry!

The AAA man was great and fixed it pretty quickly but by this time, Jax had woken up and was ready to get out of his car seat so that was a fun addition to the chaos. Luckily, he was so good though. So... by now it was 1:30am and we still had at least hours to get to Winemucca for our reservation. But, we wised up and figured that we shouldn't drive that far so we drove an hour and a half to Elko and had to call and cancel our reservation and we stayed in Elko instead. We got there about 3am and had to haul in the kids pack and play and their food/diapers, etc for the next day and we got to bed around 4am. Kids woke up at 7am and the day started again.

Spence took the car that morning first thing to get looked at (which is another long story) after we had fed the kids and then the four of us just tried to be entertained in our room for a few hours until he came back with our newly fixed tires. We left Elko around 11am and off we went! Of course we had to stop every 3 1/2 hours to feed the babies so our first stop was in Lovelock and we found a nice little park to stop at and feed them. Yes, they're in their PJ's still, we didn't want to find the suitcase with their clothes that morning - it would have taken another hour to pack everything back up. But here we are. We stopped as a gas station to warm up the water and then we were good to go.

After an hour or so stop in beautiful Lovelock, we were off! The babies we so good in the car!!! I was so happy about that. We ended up having to stop in Reno to pick up Spence's brother Marc at the airport and try to stuff him into our car. I ended up having a nice, cozy seat on the center console for the next hour and a half until we made it to Tahoe. But... we made it!!! My brilliant idea of leaving early didn't do us any good - other than a fun story to tell to the kids one day.

Anyway, we had a great 5 days in Tahoe with the fam. Spence and I went running in the mornings and it is so beautiful! We love it! We went on a lot of walks (it got cold at night for the babies so that is why they are so bundled up)

Others went to the south side to go shopping and on some hikes. We also went to the beach one day - not to swim of course since the water is SO COLD! But the weather was perfectly warm and it was so fun to be there. Aunt Erin and cousin Tyler are here with us.

We spent the 4th on a walk, going to get ice-cream and having a BBQ at the house. They do fireworks out on the lake too which is so fun! What an awesome experience! Kristin and I stayed back with the sleeping babies but next year, we'll maybe attempt the loud sounds and late night. But you know us, we were sticking to that schedule no matter what on this trip :)

We left Monday around 10:30am (Cali time) and drove the whole way back with 2 feeding stops along the way and made it home around 10:30pm. It took over an hour and a half to just get to Tahoe City! (yah, we are real smart leaving the day after the holiday - oops!) The babies did awesome the whole drive except for a slight "falling apart" from Wendover to Tooele. They are such good babies - we are so lucky and blessed!

Thanks Kristin and Mike for letting us go there and Mike for cooking such great meals for us too! And of course thanks to all the aunts and uncles that helped us feed the babes while we were there - we love you guys! What a fun trip - we made it!