Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia

 And then we drove home.  I only got lost without cell signal and almost ran out of gas once.  

The kids were super good.  It was super fun.  I LOVED going on our trip!

It was nice to be back with Peter!

Illinois

 We dropped Peter off at the O'Hare airport and made it to his parents house in time for church.  Then we spent three days with Grandma and Grandpa!

We had a very fancy tea party.  And ate so much yummy food.

They did all sorts of things like mini-golf, bowling, swimming, and all sorts of other things, but I was dead tired, so I stayed home and tried to catch up on co-op, doctor, church, and all sorts of other stuff.  So much stuff that needed caught up on.

Grandma also had Brita try on some old clothes of hers and her sister's.   

Wisconsin, Chad's family!

 

They got some water toys, so the kids played outside and then we roasted hot dogs, and the kids played a ton!  It was so fun to be with cousins!

This sign made Elias stop whining.  It was funny--he didn't have 5 cents, so we told him he couldn't whine.

Wisconsin, the library

 We stopped at a library in Mauston, Wisconsin.  It turned out they were having a book sale, so that was awesome.

We came away with a LOT of books.

Minnesota

 We played the lake game in Minnesota.  It's a very simple game: any time you see water in Minnesota (the Land of 10,000 Lakes) you yell "LAKE."  I think it's hilarious.  I'm sure no one else does.

We also stopped at this rest area with this beautiful mosaic.

Iowa

 Our route was super close to Iowa so Peter found us a place to stop.  We visited the HIGHEST PLACE IN IOWA!  Hawkeye Point!

It was on a corner surrounded by fields, so you kind of looked at it and wondered if it really was the highest point or not, but it was super funny to visit, and they did a great job of making it amazing.  They had a little museum in a barn, and an outdoor farm machinery museum.

They had signs pointing to every other State's highest point which I thought was cool.  

South Dakota (with a little bit of Wyoming first)

  We clipped the corner of Wyoming and then made it to South Dakota!  I felt like we did so many things in South Dakota, but there are still so many South Dakota things we didn't do!

We were there the Thursday before the Sturgis rally (a HUGE motorcycle rally), so there were motorcycles EVERYWHERE!

We drove through Deadwood and the amount of motorcycles there was staggering.

Then we went to Mount Rushmore!

And worked on Junior Ranger badges

And saw the museum.

We went to the prairie on top of the Wind Cave.  We didn't get tickets in to the Wind Cave, but it was fun to see the bison and the prairie dogs.  The museum was interesting, too.

We stopped at Wall Drug for the first time in my life.

This dinosaur roars every 15 minutes.  It was slightly traumatizing to a couple kids.

We stopped at a park at the edge of the Missouri River.  Mostly because Silvey's hood had started to flap ever so slightly.  It was pretty fun, and crazy hot!

We also stopped a couple blocks from the corn palace, but didn't see it.  Instead we put in a bolt so Silvey's hood wasn't only held on on one side anymore.  Quality time hanging out outside Menard's, that's for sure.