The last few days of vacation

At the end of our second week of vacation, we drove to my brother and sister-in-law's house for their baby blessing.

The route to their house is one that we've traveled before, and there is some gorgeous scenery out there. I loved all the trees around where they live.

sunset, while driving to their house.

daytime view of some of the trees, on the drive back home.

another daytime view, showing the river and the gorge.

LMS and her cousin who's two played very well together and had lots of fun. Last time they saw each other, the cousin wouldn't leave her parents' sides, so they didn't play then.

My brother and SIL have four kids; their oldest 3 and LMS, along with grandparents and various aunts and uncles had a marshmallow fight. This is done by constructing a blow gun out of PVC pipe, and then blowing mini-marshmallows at each other. Great fun till someone starts licking the marshmallows before blowing them at you (yuck!).

the four grandkids all ready to go. the girls weren't really sure what was going on, the boys have their game faces on and are ready to go!

loading up

blowing marshmallows on the grass

We had a good time visiting with family (a decent number of my siblings were able to make it) and meeting our new nephew.

The day after the blessing we started the long trip home, which was really loooong. We stopped at my sister's house for awhile so the little girls could play for a few minutes. We had originally planned on spending the night there on the way home, but ultimately decided not to, and we had both told our daughters they would get to see each other. It wasn't too much of a detour, so we had a quick visit before getting back on the road.

At one point we stopped for gas and a potty break, and LMS saw baskets of fruit in the store and got very excited. After taking care of business, she picked out an apple and a banana, and proceeded to eat them all up. She didn't want the candy that was everywhere, she wanted the fruit!

munching on her fruit while watching a movie

This morning around 2:30 am, we were almost home, and we saw cop lights behind us. We weren't sure why he pulled us over: we weren't speeding, we weren't to the construction zone yet, there was no erratic driving going on. Turns out he pulled us over as a "courtesy" to let us know our headlight was out. Thankfully, he didn't see our expired trailer tags; he just gave us a warning and told us to get it fixed as soon as possible (got that taken care of today!).

I discovered the tags were expired the day we left on our trip. That was a Friday, and the DMV is closed on Fridays, so we couldn't do anything about it. For some reason, we weren't sent a renewal notice, and while my parents have used the trailer on several occasions, this was the first time we were using it, and I thought we still had time left on the tags. We needed the space for the things we were bringing, so we took a risk and brought it anyway. Tomorrow, I will be going out to the DMV and getting it taken care of. No more illegal driving for us.

our trusty little trailer.