What We Were Doing While Everyone Else Was Seeing Eclipse

On the way home from the crazy tractor park today we bought the World's Most Enormous Owinge Soda. Chancho hosed it because Nashville is a hot, sweaty place. But I'm getting ahead of myself.In the suburbs of Nashville there is a park that contains the following crazy tractor:

This is lucky because on one of our many gagillion-mile drives this summer, Chancho woke up from a long nap in his car seat and told us, "I was driving a craaaazy tractor!" All of Chancho's crazy tractor dreams came true in Nashville today. But before that...

To get here we had to drive through St. Louis...during rush hour. Luckily, because we were going 5 MPH, I was able to take this little beauty from my driver's seat. Ansel Adams, eat your heart out.

But before that, I made a wrong turn in Illinois and got to see Carthage Jail on accident.

Before I made the wrong turn that led me to Carthage Jail, I missed the turn onto IL 9/96 toll bridge over the mighty Mississip. This caused us to arrive at Nauvoo thirty minutes later than I planned, which turned out to be a good thing because...

I bumped into my husband's awesome aunt Julie and her two beautiful daughters, Brooke and Carli! Only in Mormondom could a coinkydink of this magnitude occur. I love my adopted aunt Julie--she is a very cheerful person. Seeing them in Nauvoo made my day. By this point Chancho was so grumpy that other kids were throwing candy at him just to get him to chill out.

Before we ran into Julie and her girls, we took a picture of this really neat statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. And DJ was just starting to get grumpy.

Isn't the Nauvoo temple pretty? I have a smudge on my camera lens, just like my friend Jenn (hi Jenn!), and I keep forgetting to wipe it off. It makes my kids look angelic, right?

You know better. Look how DJ turns his back to the camera defiantly. Little grump.

I think the reason that DJ was grumpy was because before Nauvoo we slept in a hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where no one actually got to sleep. It was a really nice room with a TV and a Tess, two things that seriously impede our ability to sleep.

Before the Cedar Rapids hotel we drove through field after field of corn.

Before the corn fields we got stuck in rush hour in Minneapolis.

Before that I was stuffing all of our belongings into every available orifice of my Tahoe. It was a tight squeeze, but I didn't have to throw away my Fluff. Whew.

Before I stuffed the Fluff I was sitting in our apartment thinking, "I miss DJ. We should drive to Nashville."

The Beginning.