our trip to south dakota.

Whoo, buddy.  I have so much to cover at this point, so I'm just going to do what I can, and start where I can.  So today I'm going to tell you about a few parts of our trip to South Dakota: the drive, and our visit with Todd's parents.

Our trip up was fun, though we kept it somewhat abbreviated compared to other years.  We will be heading up again later this summer, so we felt less pressure to see and do all our regular stuff, like driving through the Badlands and stopping at Falls Park.  It was raining and cold for much of the stretch across South Dakota, so we just stayed huddled and warm in the car, and plan on hitting those things when it's warmer.

It wasn't that we didn't do ANYTHING fun, though!  We stopped in Rock Port to play, and it was sunny and relatively warm there, considering it was only 8:30 in the morning.

Once we got back in the car, this girl fell asleep.  She traveled so well both there and back, falling asleep easily when she was tired.  My kids don't typically sleep well in the car, so this was a very welcome miracle.

Full house, featuring a double chin.  Can you spot it?

We typically eat dinner in Murdo, where there's a fun drive-in with burgers and shakes, but they weren't open for the season yet, so we made it all the way to Wall before grabbing food.  We don't usually bother with Wall Drug, but if you're in Wall, you can't pass up a photo with the random roadside dinosaur!

We got in to Custer at a fantastic time, and the kids had a little bit of time to unwind before hitting the hay.  In the morning, they did what they love doing at Grandma and Papa's: they watched cowboy movies, ate Grandma's amazing cooking, and ran around outside like savages.

Tiny boy on a tiny bike.

Bigger boys on bigger bikes under the biggest sky.

Now, THIS is my kind of good time.

Callista split her time between outside and inside, coming in long enough to smoke Juni at mini foosball and serenade us all on the keyboard.

Lots of foosball was had by all, including Yours Truly, who is NOT A GAMES PERSON, if you didn't know that before.  I was sweet-talked into it by a handsome nine-year-old and lost my head for a moment.

This is the vision of sugarplums that dances through their heads all year long while they await our next South Dakota trip: their gang of bikes.  We don't really have bikes at our house, due to lack of storage and lack of anywhere to ride them.  (In the name of telling the whole truth, we do have one bike that was rescued from a trash pile on the side of the road that all the kids share, and which has a flat tire.)  So the kids look forward to their once-a-year opportunity to go bicycle gangbusters for a time.

We stayed at Grandma and Papa's for a couple of days, then headed into Rapid City for a conference/rally thing, which I'll tell you more about soon.  After a few days in Rapid, we headed home again.  We stopped to see the Sacajawea statue in Chamberlain...

... and stopped in Sioux City at our favorite park.  We typically don't drive home on the weekend or something, because we were not anticipating it being SO BUSY, but it was packed.  It was also, weirdly, stiflingly hot.  So this was a relatively quick stop as well.

The kids commented on how the baseball mascot guy seemed so much smaller than they remembered him being.  I don't think it's HIM getting SMALLER, but rather...

I like to call this pair of shots, "I Know Where Juni Gets Her Face."

I just LOVE this photo of the boy gang.

We stopped at Rock Port again on the way home. 

The smiles you see on their faces are actually looks of relief - it was a much needed reprieve from some car trouble we had on the way home.  The van was shaking and shuddering like crazy, and would suddenly weave to one side or the other, and Todd had to drive the last six hours of our trip going 55 miles an hour.  We took it into the shop the next day to find out that our van had shoddy tires, one of which was shaped like an egg, so new tires were purchased posthaste.  We also are continuing to have problems with loose steering, even though we have taken it in a few times for this already, which is what was causing the weaving.  We'll be having that looked at again soon.

And that was our trip - fun, quick, and we can't wait to go again in a few months!  I'll tell you soon about the conference we attended while there, and about Penelope's birthday, which we celebrated at Grandma and Papa's.