Road Trip

Every year when the kids are out of school for UEA we head south to visit Adam's parents.  We delayed our planned arrival a bit when we found out that Adam's parents were going to be in Provo for a funeral on Thursday morning. So, we planned to meet up with them when the funeral was done and caravan back south.  It wasn't too long before we encountered trouble.

This is not a parking lot, this is the freeway.  After it took us 45 min. to go about 1 mile we decided to stop off in the small town of Santaquin to get a bite to eat.  We figured we would let the traffic accident or whatever was causing the back up clear out so we could be on our way.  Adam's grandmother grew up in Santaquin so his Dad remembered a little Mom & Pop restaurant he used to go to.

Ahh, the Family Tree Restaurant--how fitting.  It was super mommy & poppy, if you know what I mean. The decor had us speechless.

It was family owned and they were determined to make sure you knew that. . . .and every member of the family that ever was, of course.  I enjoyed their excitement for Halloween.

Skeletons hanging off an antler chandelier-- nice touch.

We ordered 4 scones with our meal.  We didn't realize that each scone was about 2 feet long.

If we had known they were life sized we wouldn't have ordered anything else.  Hey, when it comes to scones they don't mess around!

After a delightful lunch we stopped at the Red Barn for some apples and picture taking with enormous pumpkins.

This is proof that Korinne actually volunteered to work.

After our pleasant Santaquin diversion we got back on the freeway which looked like it was back to normal.  After about 3 minutes it returned to its previous "parking lot" status.  All in all we figured we spent about 2 hours in gridlock traffic-- all in the middle of nowhere!

It turns out the back-up was because of a lane closer but when we finally reached the point where it went down to one lane we didn't see a single person working on the lane that was "closed". Double Grrr. If I'm going to sit in traffic for a couple of hours I want to see some worker bees actually WORKING, not this:

Seriously, people.  Lanes should only be closed when they filled with people working!

We only made one more pit-stop to use the restrooms and couldn't resist taking photos of the randomly placed gigantic rocking chair in front of the store.

We arrived at our destination about a day after we had originally planned on arriving, but had quite an adventurous time getting there.

Friday marked exactly 35 years since I entered the world at 11:53 a.m. in the great state of Minnesota.  For my big day I got a BIG head cold.  The likes of which I haven't seen in years.  How festive.  I felt it coming on about 3 days previously and did all of the things I usually do to ensure that it wouldn't develop into a bad head cold but, much to my chagrin, it came anyway.  We managed to celebrate anyway.

My one request for my birthday is that Adam take the day off from work and hang out with me all day.  This year he planned to do just that, but then he had a couple of loans go into crisis the night before and spent most of the day working from his parent's house.  We did manage to sneak away and have lunch so that was good.

The kids had a lot of fun with their cousins while we were there. The first night everyone came to Adam's parents house for a birthday party for me and the second night everyone went to Aunt Jaclyn's for a Halloween Party (I still need to get pictures from  her because I forgot my camera).  Jaclyn is a party planner extraordinaire so it was an awesome Halloween party.

On Saturday morning the local college had their Homecoming parade so we went to check it out.  The crowd was sparse. I took some pictures so you can see how few people were on the other side of the street watching the parade.

This meant the kids didn't have a lot of competition for the candy.  They got a LOT of candy, which made the parade a raging success in their eyes.

The weather was great the entire time we were there.  Unfortunately we weren't able to visit Grammie or Grandma Great because of my head cold so yesterday after attending church we headed back north and found more of this:

Another freeway parking lot.  It just wasn't our trip when it came to traffic.  This time it was caused by an accident, but it added time to our already long drive.

The kids sure loved visiting their Gramma and Grampa. Thanks for a great trip!