After our side trip we went to North Carolina for 2 weeks. It rained most of the time and we were ready to go home, only we had forgotten where that was exactly. Steven accepted a job with his sister in Oklahoma. So we went back to our old home, Utah, for a few weeks. We switched out our summer clothes for winter clothes. By now we are professionals at packing up our car. We can get quite a bit to fit into small places. We also fixed the car up a bit and prepped ourselves for one last road trip, well for at least 6 months.
Everyone told us the route we were taking from American Fork, UT to Denver was the long way so we decided to try their way. It added 2 hours to our trip. Instead of an 18 hour car ride we decided to make it 20 hours.
Although it took longer than we would have liked we finally ended up in one place and we're ready to settle a bit. Now the adventure of staying in one place for a while begins. While we make Oklahoma a home, we will see who wins Stevens business for next summer and where we will go...

This time we decided to stop in a city called Nauvoo. It has a lot of LDS historic sites there and we were so close we couldn't pass it up. It may have added an extra 2 hours to our over all trip but it was worth it.
We stayed in a hotel right across from the Mississippi river. We started out by going to Carthage jail, this was a great teaching and spiritual time for our family. We were the only one on the tour and so I didn't have to worry about our children distracting others. It was very nice, that alone was worth the side trip.
Than we went to some of the old historic buildings and saw how things were done. We went to the blacksmith shop, saw how they baked bread, made candles, made rugs and Kadan's favorite, made ropes. It was a rainy day so we didn't do as much as we could have. The temple was unique and absolutely beautiful. Although we lost the pictures from this trip it was amazing. Kadan still has his rope that we made as a family. It reminds us how we can't be as strong if we do things by ourselves, but as a family we can be extremely stronger.

The kids favorite part were the bathtub pools. We had a jacuzzi tub in our room and they thought it was our very own mini "bathtub pool." Later that evening I go to give the kids a bath when I notice Kadan had a weird round piece of skin coming off his belly. Or was it? I call Steven in to come take a look, sure enough it was a tick. His first tick, well our first tick. He was fine up until we got it off and he realized it was a bug bitting him. Dad telling him it was sucking his blood didn't help either. So that is partly why we moved East, to sell pest control. They have a lot more bugs!

So we left good old "Happy Valley" early. Like 5 am early thinking the kids would sleep (yeah right!) We decided to stop in Denver which was only about 8 hours out. We needed to eat and stretch anyways.
As a little girl I remember getting to go eat at this place called Casa Bonita. We got to choose where we wanted to eat on our birthdays and we usually chose that or McDonald's. That was a luxury to me growing up. Casa Bonita is a Mexican restaurant with awful food, all you can eat free sopapillas and great entertainment. It was EXACTLY as I remember it. Kadan loved the the cowboy skit where the he got shot into the water and Yesenia was a little nervous when the gorilla came running by our table. We still ended up eating food elsewhere afterwords.
It was nice letting my kids now have some of their own memories of a place I have so many at as well.