Farm Week

Our main summer vacation this year was a road trip to visit the Crawfords in Nevada, make our way west to Alpine for the annual Johnson family reunion, then make a few fun stops on our way home. Altogether it was 41 hours of driving. The first stretch was the longest- 14 hours in one day. 

We printed and laminated this map with a color coordinated table outlining our itinerary. It is so nice to have this handy in the car when the kids ask "so, where are we going again?"

 

The kids were so good in the car. I love this picture because you can see Felix laughing in the mirror. He slept for most of the way. There were some tears around hour 10 when Annie realized that we STILL weren't close. That's also about when Isaac started coughing in a croup kind of way, which was wild because he didn't even have a stuffy nose the day before. We were really worried about it because we left his croup steroids at home and knew we would be far from any kind of ER at Elizabeth's house. We gave him some ibuprofen to keep the swelling down and figured out how to get a prescription sent to the pharmacy in Winnemucca for us to pick up the next day. We ended up being able to get it under control without using the steroid, but it sure was nice having it on hand just in case. It went down to the level of a normal cold that Isaac had for the rest of the trip and shared with Felix. I got to spend a lot of time with sad coughing boys in the middle of the night this trip. Luckily, they were generally fine during the day.

Elizabeth's house is such an overwhelmingly pleasant place. I love how easy it is to play outside here. 

A family of wild turkeys with two chicks was constantly hanging out near the house! I was obsessed with them. 

Annie prefers the furry to the feathered friends and was obsessed with the cats, especially this kitten. 

Isaac's obsession was with their marble track. He beelined straight for it first thing every morning. 

Felix wanted so very badly to eat all the marbles. Distracting him with sweet wiggle car rides was fairly effective. 

The joy is so real with this little guy

The kids made an impressive stair slide out of the gymnastics mattresses and all the attic theater pillows

Elliot on the zipline. When I tried, I weighed it down enough to really collide with some tall weeds to the point where my phone fell out of my pocket. We had to use the "find my phone" feature on my watch to find it by following the beeping sounds. 

This was Isaac's first year of being big enough to go on the zipline without the baby bucket seat! We tried to take some cool video footage of the zipline with Aaron's drone, but it was too windy.

One of my new favorite things to do by Elizabeth's house is to go to the reservoir! We took the kayaks around for a bit, but the kids mostly wanted to work on their "chocolate milk store." They sold two exciting varieties of chocolate milk- thick or watery. Delicious. 

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Annie with some nice chocolate milk fingers

They dug an impressively deep mud hole! You can see here that it came up to Elliot's thigh.

On the way back, we stopped by some hot springs. Someone rigged up pipes and tubs to make them more accessible. It was a little sulfuric but oh so relaxing!