Monday June 25, 2012

Wow!  What a day!  We left Elyria at 7:40 this morning after having all showered, eaten breakfast (the boys were in 7th heaven as they chose Fruit Loops (yuck!) for breakfast), gassed up the truck and got back onto I-80.  We traveled across the rest of Illinois and then across Indiana and Iowa before stopping tonight at 9:30 in North Sioux City, South Dakota - about 14 hours!  Of course, it is "only" 8:30 here as we changed to Central time when we crossed the Mississippi.  Much of the day, the view out the window was a little wheat, a few cabbage fields and CORN, CORN, CORN!  The boys will probably never want to eat a corn product again for the rest of their lives.  We did get to explain about the extremely long "walking" water systems that we saw along the way on the huge farms.  By the time we got to Iowa, we lost most of the trees except those planted around the farm houses.  Car wise, we did pass a Jaguar and a Mustang near Chicago and the boys all decided that this event helped to cancel out being passed by a Smart car yesterday (how embarrassing!).  We passed the exits for Ronald Reagan's birthplace (I guess I thought he was born in California), Captain Kirk's "future" birthplace, and the RV Hall of Fame - choosing instead to drive on and get as far as we could today to make tomorrow's drive a bit shorter.  We didn't actually mean to drive this far, but there were absolutely NO motels in western Iowa!  We were tempted to stop and camp in an abandoned house by the side of the road, but decided we could stand sitting in the car a little longer.  Fortunately, we had trail mix, grapes, apples and water in the car so no one actually starved to death.  The boys watched two movies and we finished "Brian's Winter".  It was quite good.  We also listened to "Storm Runners" - another good book.  We looked out the windows, but there wasn't too much to see except CORN!  We did see several fields of wind turbines and the kids were quite amazed at the sight.  We also saw several trains that were over 100 cars long!  The boys are busy writing in their journal while I am typing this and we are all waiting for the pizza to be delivered as there are no restaurants within walking distance of our motel and we ALL refuse to get back in the truck until morning!  Theo says "we finally got to the hotel and I am really happy about that".  Alex's "favorite part of the day was seeing all of the giant windmills".  Dan says that his favorite part of the day "was watching Eragon".  The pizza finally arrived and our bellies are full.  The boys have brushed their teeth and I just read chapter 2 of Tucket's Travels, which is the story of a boy who is traveling with his family in a Conestoga wagon to a new home in the West.