It was super fun to take the kids to see the “Statue of the Liberty” on the first day of our vacation.
It was a cloudy and overcast day so the picture of the Manhattan skyline don’t pop with color, but it was still really neat to see the skyline from this vantage point.
At first we couldn’t figure out why our youngest would lay down on the ground when we were at the base of the pedestal.
Scott and I started dating our senior year of high school, when we were both 17. A few years ago we were out for an anniversary date and realized that we were approaching the point in our life when we would have been together as much of our life as we weren’t together. We decided we wanted to celebrate such a momentous occasion and so we (and by we, I really mean Scott) calculated out when exactly that would be… our dates are different since we don’t share the same birthday.
When we switched out history curriculum this year so that the whole family studies the same period of history (with varying level of work catered to their age level), one of the reasons I was MOST excited was that our field trips would be applicable to all. When our tutorial gave off for Presidents Day, I was eager to take advantage of the day free of book work to go on a field trip.
The last stop on our grand adventure of 2013 was Grandma and Papa’s house. We arrived in the afternoon on the 4th of July… just in time for a cookout. The kids greatly enjoyed tractor rides with Papa, playing board games with Grandma and running the trains in the basement.
Then they requested a visit to “The Coolest Playground Ever.” As we trekked around the US over the past 3 weeks, Scott and I learned from the kids that the playground by which all playgrounds are judged against is the wooden one by Grandma and Papa’s.
We set out from our friends in Iowa and headed north east. Our destination was the suburbs of Chicago. Scott and I visited Chicago last year for our anniversary and while I loved the city and would love to visit it again, we didn’t feel this was the trip to take the family into the city. Instead we planned a stop at Lego Discovery Center outside of the city.
After leaving the Badlands, we were Eastward bound and on the homeward stretch. We planned lots of fun stops for this part of the journey, knowing it was the final stretch and wanting to change it up a bit and keep things fun and exciting.
Our first such stop was in Sioux Falls, SD. I found a hotel there that had a water slide and a splash pool. There was also a put put course in town.
Well, I am really sad to say our trip is winding down. We visited the last National Park of our vacation and we can count the number of days left on our trip on one hand. The last park on this grand vacation was Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
We hit the Badlands on a great day and a great time of day. The sun was low in the sky making the colors pop out.
Saturday we left Mt Rushmore and drove 4.5 hours north to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, ND. A visit to this park meant an approximately 9 hour driving detour from what could have otherwise been a short hop from Mt. Rushmore to the SD Badlands. Sometimes a quest such as our forces your hand to take some pretty circuitous routes… we set off not exactly sure what the ND badlands had to offer that the SD badlands did not.
11 years ago when Scott and I did our first National Park/Cross Country trip, we drove through Wind Caves National Park. We hadn’t yet begun our quest to see every National Park, so we actually just drove through the park and enjoyed the prairie dogs and buffalo. It was literally a stop on our way, not a destination in itself. This time, Scott and I wanted to see the park the right way and go on a cave tour.
We arrived at Great Sand Dunes National Park in the middle of the night so our first view of the dunes was when we opened up our tent the next morning. We thought for sure we wouldn’t be able to get a site since they were first come first serve and we were so very late. But once again we were blessed with a camp site in the park.