{ Summer Vacation . Part One }

We had such a great time while we were gone....here, let me show you pictures, I think that will explain better than I could with words....

 July 22. The kids don't even know how much riding they are in for yet...

Really cool rest stop on our way up North...

A little lunch on the tailgate, along the side of the road somewhere in Nevada. Payton had been riding with a friend of ours, so it was nice to see him again after a few hours of driving! 
Yep, he hadn't changed much ;)

And THIS is what all that driving --and riding without their brother-- does to the girls! Ha! They were being so goofy. Such good sports they were about driving so many (many!) hours. 

Our first night of camping. It felt SO GOOD to get out of the car. I mentioned that Payton was riding with a friend of ours, Mark--  he is in this picture here, roasting hot dogs for dinner with Eric and the kids. 

July 23. Day two of driving and the girls are making new plans for us, haha! Not really, but they wanted to look at the map. 

 On our way to Three Forks we stopped at a place called "Craters of the Moon National Monument". There are many lava beds here as a result of past volcanic action. It was really neat to see the different landscape that occurs around the lava beds, and even in the lava flows themselves. 
Many of the trees here are scraggly and twisted-- I wanted to see if I could get the kids to resemble one of these trees. This was the best they could do :)

 Here we are walking up to view the inside of a cinder cone. It was steeper than this picture shows! There was even still some SNOW inside. Pretty cool. 

 Another interesting thing to do at Craters of the Moon is explore some caves. We found these caves-- thankfully there were signs telling us they were wild caves otherwise we might have thought they were tame and not been as cautious upon entering.

 This cave is called Boy Scout Cave. Likely because only boy scouts are crazy enough to crawl as far in as the map shows is possible. Eric and Payton went farther into this one than the girls and I did. Chloe and Audra did not like this cave as much as the next one...

 This was called Beauty Cave. The beauty of this one is supposed to be that there is some colorful walls inside-- but really the beauty was that we could get into it easily and it was nice and cool inside! 

 After our extra stop at Craters of the Moon, we were a little later in getting to Three Forks than we had wanted to be, but it was a great reunion once we arrived!

 The boys got right to work avoiding the girls...

 And the girls got right to work figuring out how to bother the boys...

I noticed that the hollyhocks grow like crazy around Three Forks-- almost like a weed! They were very pretty.

Early morning picture-- John would surely laugh at me for taking a picture of weeds  :) I can't help it if the weeds in Montana are pretty!

 July 24. My kids dreams have been fulfilled: they got to ride in the back of a truck, without seatbelts. My cousin gave us a tour of the ranch he grew up on, and took us up to see the view from "the top". 

This view is so different from what we see around our place-- nice and peaceful.

Thank you to John and Thelma for having us over-- we miss you! Looking forward to the next time!! 









--to be continued--