2020

There are some days, weeks, months, years when you feel like you have nothing to show for your hard work. And then there are months like June of 2019 when you put an entire second story on your house and all of that hard work suddenly becomes visible! This was our house in APRIL... just one story, pouring cement footers and creating a front entryway. And MAY... tearing out the old trusses and setting floor joists so we could put on a second story! During the first week of JUNE we put on the floor for the second story and Randy put in a staircase and started building walls! On June 13, we invited friends and family over to raise the exterior walls. (Thanks Tim, Darlene, Eric, and Dad!) And then we let our nieces put up the interior ones. (Thanks girls!) A week later the new trusses were delivered... (Thanks David!) And in a matter of 3 days we had all of them set in place too! (Thanks Dad!) Randy then framed out the bathroom (I can't be...

Our first adventure in Nebraska was to the Museum of the Fur Trade  in Chadron. The museum didn't look like much from the outside, but the artificats were incredible, spanning from furs to seeds to guns. Even their website is worth a visit! So well known and well researched is this place that they were called upon during the making of the movie Revenant (featuring Leonardo Dicaprio) to autheniticate every little detail. We ventured west from there (because why would we go east toward our final destination!) to another museum, but it was so hot that all we really wanted was an ice cold slushie. We stopped at the "Dairy Sweet" and had the best slushie of my life. You know how you usually run out of juice about halfway through? This one was blue raspberry all the way to the last slurp! AND the "barista" (what do you call someone who makes slushies???) convinced Van and me to add nerds to our drinks. Genius! So, so good. While we waited for our drink perfectio...

Yellowstone National Park is uniquely situated so that it spans 3 states: Wyoming (96%), Idaho (1%), and Montana (3%). So all week we were bouncing back and forth between these states! (Fun fact: Wyoming is the 9th largest state in the U.S. in terms of land size, but the least populated of all 50 states. Montana isn't much different, ranking 4th largest in land size and 44th in population. No wonder this is Big Sky Country--there are no people or businesses or homes to block your view!) After leaving Yellowstone through Cooke City, we took the Beartooth and Chief Joseph highways into Cody, Wyoming. I can't tell you how many people we've met in the last few months who have told us to go to Cody. No one ever said what we were supposed to do there, however, they just said to go. We found a town full of history and museums, guns and graves. And I couldn't muster up the energy for any of it.  I sent Randy and Van off to explore while I took a nap (the ...

Randy and I got up early one morning, leaving Van in bed at Robert and Suzanne's house, and went into the city of Boise. We met up with some former employee's of Randy's and delighted in catching up with them over breakfast. It was exciting to see them making Boise their home -- finding a sense of place where they could become who they were created to be. When they had to head in to work, Randy and I walked downtown Boise, checking out the courthouse, the Basque district, local coffee shops and more. It was fun to be a tourist again and was the momentum we needed for the next leg of our adventure. Since we'd picked him up, Van regularly asked if we were going to see Niagra Falls. And each time we reminded him that Niagra Falls was on the complete other side of the United States, and that while we were going pretty far east, we weren't going that far. We'd been together for 3 weeks by now, and Van wasn't giving up. Randy and I were starting to wish we...

You may have noticed that I was a little grumpy during our last 2 legs. I certainly did. And Rand seemed a little grumpy too. When I approached him about it he said, "I'm thinking about what we are going to do when we land... where we'll live, what I'll do for work..." We hadn't been having nearly as much fun as we'd had in the beginning, and the biggest reason for that was because we were so much in our heads. Randy was thinking about how he was going to take care of us once we got to Ohio. And I was thinking about the kids we'd left behind in Mexico. We received an email in May letting us know that Mari, one of the dorm moms in Mexico and the daughter of the administrators who we worked closely with, had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. She'd lost her vision and was preparing to start chemotherapy. Our hearts broke, and mine was still broken a month later. I felt so helpless, unable to do anything for my friends, unable to ...