WE'VE COME THIS FAR...WE MAY AS WELL KEEP GOING

The last two hotels have had poor internet connection, so I'm so happy to finally get some new pictures of the cross-country progress we've made. We had our excursion to Niagara Falls, and from their drove to Chicago. That was our longest leg of the trip, and it didn't help that Girlzilla (aka the Garmin Nuvi we installed last week) kept trying to get us to cut through Canada. She was pretty insistant too. She's got a British accent, so maybe she's got some Canadian loyalty going on. Or else she hadn't gotten the memo about Americans no longer being allowed to go willy-nilly into Canada. I'm not sure. Thankfully, Amy and I are skilled at map reading, and we managed to get back on course the old fashioned way.

From Chicago, we drove to Sioux Falls, SD, via Wisconsin and Minnesota. The big excitement out of Minnesota were the wind farms. I've seen pictures of those big wind mills, but I've never seen one up close, nor have I seen huge numbers of them clumped together. It's like something out of a sci-fi move. Unfortunately, I can't get the video we took of that to post, but it was pretty wild. Wisconsin has a lot of cheese.

We met up with my parents at the hotel in Sioux Falls (they are currently on their own semi-cross-country trip) and drove with them to Mount Rushmore. We all really enjoyed that.

We arrived this evening in Gillette, WY. Nothing against the rest of the midwest, but Wyoming is really much prettier that our previous states. As the kids experience meltdowns during all these long drives, our redirect tactic has gone from "look at the corn!" to "look at the rocks!" The kids are really holding up pretty well. The days are very long, but the fun stuff we do on the road along with the Fruit Loops the hotels serve for breakfast (yes, I've caved. I'll go back to my old ways when we settle in somewhere) get them through the day.

Tomorrow, we head for Missoula, MT. That will be our last stop before Bremerton. Woo-hoo!