Ahhh…Vacation…but things never start off smoothly for us, it seems. We are headed to South Dakota, for the wedding of Trevor’s sister, Danielle. Our plan was to leave Wednesday morning at 6:30. But after thinking about it for a while, we figured…why get up sure early and drive tired? So we decided to just get up at our normal time, which would put us out the door at around 7-7:30 am. Well, we did very well at our E.T.D. and were on the road by 7:30. It was starting to storm, but we didn’t let that stop us, so off we went, lightening flashing and thunder rolling. About 20 minutes down the road, after several streaks of lightening, one very close lightening bolt flashed and then …..our van died. Just like that. No reason, no explaination, just stop working. We were able to get it started again, and got off on the very next exit. After a couple of phone calls, we headed back home. Trevor drops us off and takes the van to AutoZone so they can run a “test” on it to see what happened. Trevor thinks we may have been hit by lightening. They didn’t think so. They said it seemed to be a blocked air duct. Lucky for us, one of the pilots that Trevor works with, who is also very auto smart, lives within 10 mins of our house. So he told Trevor to bring the van over and he’d look at it. The problem was indeed a blocked air duct. The blockage cause by a very tiny half inch dust bunny. Crazy, I know, but that was the problem. So after cleaning that out, the van was running like a top once again.
So 2 hours later, we are finally on the road, once again. The kids all did excellent. We stopped very little, thanks to the packed cooler we took with us. We had a few more unexpected delays involving traffic and construction, but we drove a good chunk of our trip and managed to pull into our hotel, in Lavern Minnesota, at 12:30 am Wed night/Thurs Morn.
The kids were up bright and early the next morning, so instead of hanging out at the hotel and waisting time, we decided to head on out. We only had about 5 hours of the trip left, until we hit our destination, so we took our time driving and did some sight seeing. We hit a few parks and did some short hikes. We then headed over to the Badlands. We did some hiking in the Badlands as well as some sightseeing there too. The kids had a blast. We saw lots of prarie dogs, some pronghorn antelope and lots of birds.
After leaving the badlands, we headed on to The Emonds house, in South Dakota. I spend a lot of time reading the NUMEROUS signs advertising Wall Drug, Reptial Gargens, Mt. Rushmore and other Tourest Attractions, until Trevor was about to go crazy. HAHAHA.
We arrived at about 7:30 (their time) and had a very yummy supper, then spend the rest of the evening catching up on family stuff.
Thus ends our first 2 days of vacation.
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