Last week was a long week of driving with stops in Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio. In Kansas, we hit a tree while pulling in to our campsite and broke the awning arm off the trailer. We stopped in Jackson Center, Ohio to try to get the awning fixed among other things, but they were too busy to fit us in, so we moved on to our next RV park.

Before leaving Dodge City, we spent the morning at the Boot Hill Museum, a historical museum about the Old West. At lunch, the kids were super excited to sit at the children’s table and drink some of daddy’s root beer.  Zane loved listening to a recording of gunfighters shooting their guns.

It rained much of the time we were in Missouri. Somewhere between Kansas and Missouri, Stephen let me drive the truck pulling the trailer. I convinced him it was a safe place to practice because all I had to do was drive straight. Before we left, we stopped at a nearby lake to feed the carp. It was a little creepy to hear the sound of squishy fish swimming on top of each other in their eagerness to get the dried fish food the kids were throwing at them.

The kids were a little disappointed we weren’t able to stay more than one day at the Indianapolis KOA. Our campsite was right next to the playground. There was a kiddie pool (3ft at the deepest, 1-2 ft deep in some spots) I took the kids to with water slides, showering mushrooms, and large buckets that would tip over with water. The kids loved it. We had a campfire later that night. While Stephen and I sat around the fire, the kids were playing at the playground. Zane was on the slide and Zoey was on top of the monkey bars until her shoe dropped. She went to go get it, looked at her shoe, shrieked and ran to us. Zane then ran to her shoe, shrieked and ran to us. Stephen and I then had to get up and look. This is what we saw.

Stephen then told the kids how he and Uncle Philip used to catch cicadas when they were kids, put a dot on their back with nail polish, release them, then catch more to see if they ever caught the same one twice. We then listened to a Sleepytime Sparkle Story about Cicadas because how could anyone be frightened of a cicada after listening to one of David’s stories?

The morning we left the Airstream in Jackson Center, OH to hopefully get fixed, Stephen got food poisoning after eating breakfast out. We had planned to spend the day at the National Airforce Museum in Dayton, OH. Stephen stayed in the truck until he was feeling somewhat better while I walked around the museum with the kids. Our friends had gone there months earlier and taken photos in astronaut suits. Zane kept asking where the astronaut suits were, and I finally asked at an information booth. The men looked at me confused when I asked where they were until another man understood and said it was just a photograph they took at the beginning of the museum with different backgrounds you can choose to make it look like astronaut suits. It took Stephen several days to recover from food poisoning. I was glad that I had driven with the trailer before this because it was all up to me to get us safely to our next stop.

From Ohio, we spent two days in Pennsylvania at two different RV parks. Our second day  was a 4.5 hour drive to Delaware Water Gap Pocono Mountain KOA, which we’ve learned is really too long to be on the road with the kids. About an hour to 20 minutes before we arrive at our destination, Zane seems to sense it and begins either kicking the back of the passenger seat or shrieks as loudly as he can, not unlike dogs sometimes do when they sense it’s about time to exit the car.

Before arriving at the RV park, we stopped at a local store where you had to insert a quarter into the grocery cart in order to use it (you got your quarter returned to you after you returned it). While shopping, I was approached by an 8 or 9 year old boy and asked if he could show me a magic trick. I declined, explaining that I really needed to concentrate on shopping. He wasn’t too upset. He just ran off to find another person to ask. He was the same boy who was riding around the parking lot on his bicycle. I started to wonder where his parents were.  And then at checkout, I was watching people unload their unbagged groceries into another cart to bag them, thinking that was so weird until it happened to us.  The cashier put all of our  groceries in our cart even though we had our reuseable bags right there for her to use. I started to put our groceries in our reuseable bags, while she scanned the items but she pointed to a counter we had to go to bag our groceries. Stephen had commented on the way in how he noticed there was a woman pushing two grocery carts full of food not in bags. Now we understood, and yet I was still so confused. Has anyone ever been to a grocery store like this?