For our big family trip this summer, we decided to take a road trip to Nauvoo, IL and Missouri and see all of the church history sites along the way. So, as soon as the kids got out of school on Thursday, we headed out on our adventure. It was a long drive but totally worth it. We had many amazing experiences; fun ones as well as spiritual ones. We loved it and want to go back soon.
We decided to take the camp trailer along with us and stay in camp grounds along the way. This made lodging less expensive but gas more expensive but in all it was a good decision.
The only bad thing about it was that when we were getting the trailer ready to go, we discovered that the fridge was going out. About $600 later, we still did not have a fridge that work properly on the gas. Luckily though, the places we were staying were all full hookups so we did have a fridge that worked with electricity. More on that later.
We left Hyrum at about 9:00 pm on Thursday, May 31 right after the Cancer Survivor's Dinner and Emily's softball game. We decided to leave at night so that the kids would sleep most of the way there. Russell also drives better at night he says. So we were off on our trip. We were so excited. We knew we wouldn't make it to Nauvoo that night because it is about a 20 hour drive (if you drive straight through) and around 1,250 miles away. But we wanted to get as far as we could. Russell ended up driving as far as Rock Springs, WY before we needed to stop at a Wal-Mart parking lot and sleep for the night. (Another plus of bringing the trailer.) The next morning we were off again on to Illinois. We stopped for lunch at this cool little rest area outside of Laramie, WY.
It was so windy because it was right on the summit and the highest point on I-80. The rest area was called the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument because right there as you come up the mountain is this giant bust of Abraham Lincoln.
It was pretty cool to see. This statue was built by Wyoming's Parks Commission to honor Lincoln's 150th birthday. The reason it is right here at this summit is because it used to stand alongside the highest point of the old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway (Hwy 30). Then when I-80 was finished and replaced the Lincoln Highway, the statue was moved to this spot.
Along with the giant bust of the president, there is a cool little visitor's center that gives a little history of the highways as well as some fun facts about Wyoming. We even saw a bear:
And the kids got arrested... As you can see Charlotte was very happy about it...
After eating lunch and exploring the sites, we were back on the road again.
And soon we were in Nebraska! Good old flat Nebraska. The drive through Nebraska was pretty uneventful because this was the scenery all around us:
Flat fields... It was really crazy but as soon as we crossed out of Wyoming into Nebraska, all of the mountains just disappeared! You could see for miles. It was really kind of weird because the world just seemed to drop off at the horizon. No wonder people thought the world was flat!
There were a ton of wind mills and wind powered generators in Nebraska. Without mountains to block it, the wind was constantly blowing.
We drove the rest of the day before stopping for dinner. The air was so humid in Nebraska that we about melted as we were eating dinner. We thought about spending the night but the heat and humidity pushed us to drive some more to try and beat the heat. As we were leaving, we noticed the storm move in and as we were driving through the night, we saw the most amazing lightning storm ever. Because there were no mountains to block, we could see the full sky and its awesome display. The lightning flashed from cloud to cloud all around us. The whole world it seemed to light up with each flash. It seriously felt like we were driving through strobe lights with all the flashing going on. I have never seen anything like it. I loved watching the lightning all over the sky, flashing everywhere and lighting up the clouds and the black night.
Then the storm hit!
As you can see, we were driving right through the storm cell. And it was a storm. There was so much rain that the windshield wipers could not keep up with the amount of water that was coming down. We could hardly see and the wind was crazy. It was seriously a monsoon. We decided we better pull off somewhere for the night. We pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot in Lincoln, NE. Just walking from the truck to the trailer, we were drenched. I don't know if I have ever seen so much rain. Thankfully, the trailer did not leak and we slept pretty soundly that night. Day one of our trip was down. We still had one more day of driving ahead of us though.
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