on the road again

This summer isn't exactly working out how we thought it would, but we're making the most of it. In February we booked a beach condo vacation with my family in Florida. Obviously back then we had planned to fly, but we still don't think flying is a great idea so we set off on Thursday on a 24 hour adventure in the bus.

Our first stop was for gas in Iowa.

Our next site seeing stop was the Devonian Fossil Gorge in Iowa. Braden always gives me a hard time about the places I find for us to stop and see along the way. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. This was not a very good one. It was hard to see any fossils, but the girls loved all the tadpoles. I realized I don't think they've ever seen tadpoles. They spent a good amount of time trying to catch some... especially the ones with legs.

There were so many tadpoles....

On our way back to the highway Braden said the bus wasn't accelerating. We had a couple dicey minutes on the highway to the next exit, but we found a Walmart parking lot to stop in. I started looking for repair places and Braden started doing research on what the issue might be. Most people said it was the air filter, so Braden took it out to inspect it. While he was explaining to me how it all worked he pointed to the roof of the bus to show me where the air intake is. Clearly there was a little blockage.

Once we removed all the leaves we were back in business. Whew!

We put in a solid 8 hours for a 24 hour drive through Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and into Illinois.

We stopped in Illinois just outside St. Louis, MO for the night. We'll be back at it again in the morning. Florida here we come!