We did this last year, too.

Miles learning how much fun fishing can be.

Asher scaring the fish away.

Ben had a hard time dragging this fish out.

For some reason, the twins liked to poke its eye.

Oh, and Ben helped gut his fish and ate it! He liked it (which means Brooke has another reason to make seafood).

Ben is under the assumption that we can’t camp in New York because, “There are no mountains.” So we had to take advantage of out time in Utah.

This post is almost a month late, but we did make it to Utah in time for Pioneer Day. We caught the parade and fireworks in Mapleton. The kids had a blast and, although he’s not pictured here, I can assure you that Asher was present.

Truth be told, we’re really boring people. We don’t do much unexpectedly, so we had a good time last month driving 2,000 miles to surprise our families. We only told my brothers (we stayed with one on the way out) and Brooke’s grandmother who hosted us in Utah.

Netflix almost spoiled our fun. Before we left we changed our account address to Brooke’s parents’ house and mailed back our last DVDs on the way out of town. Wouldn’t you know it: Brooke’s sister found our next set of DVDs in their mailbox the morning before we got there. Brooke saved the day by lying through her teeth: “Oh, you got those? Yeah, that’s, um, a free trial we signed you up for. We thought you would like those DVDs…”

We noticed we would get in before Brooke’s parents would be back from a funeral, so we saw my family first. We parked down the street (in the church parking lot) and knocked on their door. My sister (who was visiting) was fairly surprised to see us. My parent’s weren’t home, so we hung out (and kept the car out of sight) until they showed up. Again, they were pretty surprised.

After dinner we headed down to Mapleton, taking the long way around so the family wouldn’t see us. “Ten-to-one says she cries,” I wagered. Ben and Miles saw grandpa working in the yard, so they ran up and surprised him. He took us inside where grandma was organizing a bedroom closet. “Look who I found in the yard,” he announced. There was silence for a second, then,

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

And, yes, she cried.

Now, for the record, this is not the sort of surprise you can get away with more than once, so I can safely say we won’t do it again.

PS – My mother commented that the best part of the surprise was not having to worry about us on the drive. She didn’t know we were driving, so she couldn’t worry about it.

Our last post (two weeks ago) said we were on a trip. Well, we’re back now, and here’s the scoop.

We threw together a trip at the last minute after Brooke’s grandfather had a medical episode (all’s well) and we realized that we were the family with the time and resources to travel. Although it would be nice to have others come see us (or, more specifically, our kids), they couldn’t, but we could go see them. We didn’t tell the kids until the morning we left and we only told Brooke’s grandmother with whom we stayed (more on that later).

We logged about 4,200 miles, through eleven states and one Canadian province. We saw four grandparents, 16 cousins, and 10 aunts/uncles. We went camping twice, fishing once, took in a parade, fireworks, In-n-Out (thrice), and stopped at Ikea. Oh, and we lost count of how many times we watched same four episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba.

Lots of pics to follow.

By the way, here are the routes we’ve traveled to-and-from Utah over the last three years.

And, when you add in our road trip to NYC and another trip to Wisconsin, about 41% of the mileage on our van has been from road trips.

After driving through the Ohio Valley, we wound up at my brother’s house.

The boys thought this was as far as we were going, but Ben figured out pretty quickly that the book we had given him was too long for such a “short” (9-hour) drive. We left westward around lunch the next day.

After Miles’ cupcake class last Wednesday, we headed right out… after waiting for a HUGE thunder shower to pass.

BTW, the Disney Sing-along DVD from Brother Bear has great travel tunes: I’m on My Way (Brother Bear), Go the Distance (Hercules), and On the Open Road (A Goofy Movie).

Back when it was still cold here, I attended a conference in San Diego. It was nice to get back to California, and to see some friends and family while I was there.