Trip home from IN continued

June 19: My cousin's family was in bed by the time we arrived the night before except he stayed up to greet us. In the morning we stayed and visited for a little while. My cousin is Lamb 2's godfather. The Lambs were getting a little wild so they went over to the school playground and for a walk. We were so glad to meet their two year old daughter, Alice. She is named after my grandma's youngest sister, her great-grandma. We had a short visit but we were glad we got to see them. We brought her some play food for her play kitchen that the Lambs had outgrown. In this picture she is holding play food oatmeal.

We stopped at Menards and stocked up on Sprecher root beer since we couldn't get the Lakefront Brewery root beer. We can get Sprecher here but it costs twice as much as Menards. We don't have Menards here. We ate at Cracker Barrel. As we were driving that afternoon a car maintenance light came on. We expected that it was because we had gone over 5000 miles since the last service, but we thought we better have it checked out in case it was more serious. I was using Ram's phone to try to figure out if we could arrive in Cheyenne with the time change before the Toyota there would close on a Friday evening. While I was doing that Ram noticed a Toyota right off the interstate in North Platte, NE. We decided to go to the next exit and turn around and go back to that Toyota. The problem was that the next exit was 40 miles away! U-turns on the interstate are not allowed. So 80 miles later we arrived back at the North Platte Toyota. Sure enough, the problem was just that we needed an oil change when we arrived home. But we felt much better after hearing  there was nothing more serious. While there we decided the 80 miles out of the way was worthy of a Dunkin Donuts trip. It was actually the first Dunkin Donut that Ram had ever eaten. We had planned to not eat until we got to Cheyenne, but we decided to get food from Qdoba while we were there.

The whole North Platte stop took a long time and was totally unplanned. That meant that it was too late to see our friends in Cheyenne. We had planned a stop to see them and let the kids play for an hour and then going to a hotel in Cheyenne.

Since we weren't stopping to see our friends, we decided to drive to Laramie instead of Cheyenne to make the next day less of a drive. We didn't have hotel reservations and the first couple we tried were full. We did find one but it was more expensive than we are used to. It was late and by that point we all just wanted to go to sleep and I didn't mind paying a little extra for a hotel room.

June 20: The Lambs were shocked that this more expensive hotel didn't serve free breakfast, you had to pay for breakfast in their restaurant. We decided to pick up breakfast on our own. We stopped at a Mexican restaurant and got huge breakfast burritos. Some of the Lambs loved that breakfast, others wished we would have stayed at a different hotel.

The rest of the day was spent driving and stopping when necessary. We were hoping that by staying in Laramie we wouldn't get home too late. In the morning I predicted we wouldn't be home until 10pm. Ram was hoping I would not be correct but I was. There was construction and that trip just takes a long time. The late nights before meant we didn't get up super early and get on the road. When we got home we completely unloaded the car and everyone was in bed by midnight. Yes, we all got up and made it to 10am church the next morning! And VBS began on Monday after that and we all made it on time to that too.

This completes my blog posts about our trip to IN. I just barely completed the blog posts before a month after our trip! Next week I'll begin to blog about what has happened since our trip.