Giant Crazy Road Trip (ie what the heck were we thinking) Part 1.

 Kevin and I decided a while ago to make a big roadtrip this summer to see our families. My sister and her family lives in Wisconsin and Kevin's brother lives in Michigan. We've never driven out that way before and it has been a few years since we have seen them. And since we have a giant car that can more than accommodate our family and all our stuff, we decided to try it out. I was a little nervous about the driving, Edyn is still little and I was mostly worried about how she would do. I over prepared and made binders, games, packed way too much stuff and didn't use half of it but I felt ready for anything!  We decided to use as many Costco's as possible while driving to get our gas and we also used it on quite a few occasions for cheap lunches. I think Kevin and I don't want Costco pizza for a long, long time.

Day 1 we made it to Billings, Montana which was our goal and stayed at a slightly ghetto but incredibly fun hotel that had a waterslide.  I think the kids and I went down it at least 20 times and this turned out to be our favorite hotel of our whole trip. There was no height limit and the kids could go down by themselves and they thought it was the best thing ever.

It made me feel better about locking them in the car for 10 plus hours that first day and made for a pretty fun night.

The breakfast was pretty good too and Isak became an expert at continental breakfasts.

 

 The next day we made it to Jamestown, ND which apparently is home of the buffalo. We found a nice motel in the middle of town that also had a little slide and the kids were able to play for a while. We got to take our time on the way to Wisconsin, about 3 1/2 days of driving, because Kevin had a breakfast appointment in Minneapolis on Monday.

We were in a hurry to leave Sunday morning but Isak convinced us to go visit the buffalo museum. So glad I listened to him because this was a pretty cool site! Its about 60 tons of fiberglass and is surrounded by a buffalo reserve and you can see buffalo roaming around.

On Sunday we made it to Minneapolis, after being slowed down by crazy traffic, and toured around

the mall of America. It had a giant Nickolodeon land in the middle of it complete with theme park and roller coaster.  We also walked through the lego store which was amazing and had tables of legos all over for kids to play with. It had these huge lego sculptures on top of the store and a floor to ceiling wall of every color of Lego you an imagine.  Other than that, it was just a giant shopping mall and I wasn't super impressed. Probably would've been more fun without three very hungry, tired, and whiny kids!

We stayed in a hotel right by the mall and it had an amazing water park inside.  I noticed a ton of hotels out that way have poolside rooms that open out onto the indoor pool. You can pay like $10 extra to have one of these rooms and have immediate access to the pool. We never did it and I imagine with little kids it might drive me crazy to have them begging to go out the door to the pool constantly.

 Our kids did pretty well on the way there and we made sure to stop every few hours and let them stretch and run. Isak would often run laps around the rest areas until it was time to leave.

 We also got to read lots of great information about the local areas (not much in North Dakota, FYI) at these places and learned some cool stuff. I packed lots of bread, PB, and honey and we sometimes stopped at parks and had lunch as well.  The kids loved this and I didn't have to worry about them picking up weird viruses from nasty play place equipment although we had stopped at a few of those as well.  It was also on this trip that Edyn learned a new scream that we have fondly named the "banshee" yell, it can peel paint off the walls. And lucky for us, she not only uses it when she wants out of the car, but when she wants our attention as well. So. Awesome.