June 10-12 ~ West Yellowstone to Walla Walla, WA

June 10-12...

We left West Yellowstone and headed on to Grandma Qualley's house. We spent the night in Boise, ID on Tuesday. We arrived at Grandma Qualley's house sometime around lunch on Thursday. It was so good to see her! Plus, it couldn't have been better timing. We had all gotten a little sick and the two day rest at Grandma's made everyone better...well almost, Sydney was still a little sick. It was a relaxing couple of days.

Caren reading to Sydney after her bath...yes..she's naked. (Sydney, not Caren. Haha)

Sydney decided she wanted to carry Aunt Caren's purse. It proved a little heavy so she ended up dragging it most of the time.

A very cute picture of the matching pair, Aunt Caren & Sydney.

Me, Grandma Qualley, Mom, Caren & Sydney before we left to head to Seaside.

Yes, Sydney gets bored and Aunt Caren's glasses can work miracles...

She also falls asleep in the most entertaining positions..

Road Trip ~ Day 4 ~ Yellowstone!

Day 4 ~ Yellowstone National Park..
This was one of the highlights of our trip! We started out driving along the winding roads and we (well, mom and I) were super excited to see snow!! Caren not so much....Chicago has plenty of snow for her and she's kinda tired of it.

After going around many corners, we came upon a line of cars and wondered what was going on..as we got closer we saw this adorable grizzly bear cub sitting in the middle of the road. We think he was hurt because a little while later the Park Service emergency vehicle went flying by. I don't think he was hurt bad though...hopefully mamma doesn't find him while the park rangers are taking care of him...That could get ugly.


We immediately headed for the gysers in Yellowstone since that was what Caren and I most wanted to see. There were lots of cool ones to look at but this one in particular was one of my favorites. The name "Heart Springs" of course, but mostly, I loved the color of blue it was.

Caren and I were so excited to see "Old Faithful" that we even sat out in the drizzling rain and waited for the stupid gyser to blow. It was pretty cool and we had fun trying to take pictures of ourselves in front of the camera but had no success so we then took turns taking pictures of each other in front of Old Faithful.

We also got to see a bunch of the wild animals that the park has. Some of our favorites were the baby buffalo..which are called calves, I believe. And the elk and of course the bald eagle's nest.

The funny part about the bald eagle's nest is that there is a sign specifically telling tourists to not park and disturb anything. So what did we do...stop of course...lol. But at least we were nice enough not to get out of our car like most of the other people. We just took a couple shots from our window and moved on.

All in all, Yellowstone was a cool place to visit. I wish we had had a couple days to visit it instead of one but I will definately look forward to going back, especially when Sydney is a little older and will appriciate it herself.

Plus, we absolutely need to spend one night in the cool, big lodge that is there...it was so beautiful. And hopefully next time it won't be raining...lol.

Road Trip ~ Day 3

Day 3 ~ We spend most of this day driving....from Colorodo Springs to Sheridan, Wyoming. It was an ok day. We got to see some cool stuff while driving. We did have to spend some time entertaining Sydney but she's a trooper so she did pretty well. This is a picture of Castle Rock as we drove through Colorado. Caren was snapping all kinds of pics for her friend who used to live here but I especially liked this one and the one of Denver. I could probably live here if need be....

Mom had to spend some time entertaining Sydney. This particular time was listening to the howling monkey that Sydney "borrowed" from Grandpa's house. Yes....I was so tired of hearing that stupid monkey....

We also had our very first trip to McDonalds with Sydney. Of course I had to let her play in the playground. At first she wasn't so sure of the tunnels. She went in a couple of inches and watched as all the other kids ran by her. After I got done eating I decided to see if she'd be interested in going a little further. So yes...I went into those tunnels...those stupid tunnels made for little children. I tell you, if you ever have to go in there bring kneepads...those things are not really made for crawling on. My knees were sore by the end of it. Well, thanks to mommy, Sydney now has no fear for those tunnels. We went all the way to the top and Sydney found the cubbie that had a steering wheel where she could pretend to drive her car. We tried waving at Grandma and Aunt Caren but they weren't paying attention. And last, of course, we went down the slide together. I don't think she's quite ready to go down alone, but she seemed to like it with me...she would try to climb back in from the bottom after we slid down.

Of course, silly me had to make a blonde moment mistake...We left McDonalds to head off and about 10 minutes down the road Caren asked for her jacket cause she was a little cold. I told her to use my jacket right there on the back seat...well...there was no jacket..I had left it at McDonalds....doh!

So, I found a place to turn around and drove back hoping that no one had taken my jacket. Luckily it was still there...so much for those 20 min of driving...here we go again! lol.

2008 Road Trip! ~ DAY 2

Day 2 ~ Well. Since we were up at the crack of dawn we headed off to Colorodo Springs! Sydney managed to catch a nap and sometime around mid-morning we decided to stop at a WalMart to stretch our legs and get a few things we needed. Sydney of course found the play room and we had to spend a few minutes playing on the rides.

We stopped at Pizza Hut for lunch and kept on truckin. By 3:00 we were all ready to be there. Amazingly Sydney was pretty good in the car. She only got bored a couple of times but we managed to distracted her well enough.

We got into Colorodo Springs at 4:00pm. We checked into our room and just chilled for a while. We went down to the pool to see how Sydney would do. At first she wasn't so sure she wanted to be in the water. After about 5-10 minutes she decided it wasn't so bad. We found a beach ball and Sydney loved that! She even managed to kinda hit it to Aunt Caren a couple of times. It was very nice to relax and play in the pool for a bit and I was excited to see Sydney enjoying the water finally.

After the pool we went to dinner and came back to the hotel to just relax and let Sydney run around for a while. I hope we get a better night's sleep than last night! Check ya'll later!

2008 Road Trip! Girls Only!

My mom, my sister, Sydney and I are off on our roadtrip across the western U.S. We plan on going to Yellowstone National Park, then to Washington to see Grandma Qualley, around the Olympic Penninsula, down past Astoria with a stop at Darcy's house, into Oregon to see my Uncle Randy & Family, then to Coquille, OR to spend a few days with G&G Casper! Of course on the way home we'll hit Vegas for one night..hehe...wish us luck!

Day 1 ~ We left DFW a little later then planned...ok..alot later. We had hoped to leave around 2:00pm at the latest but one thing led to another and I think we actually drove away at 4:15pm. So our plans of driving all the way to Amarillo, TX were quickly discarded. We ended up staying the night at Childress, TX. We got in around 9:30pm so we basically chilled for a bit then went sleep. Sydney did pretty good considereing it was a new place. She fell asleep in about 5-10 min. Unfortunately we kinda had an early wakeup call... At 4:48am (yes, I checked the time) there was a very loud knock at our hotel door. Caren jumped up and leaving the security latch on, she opened the door. Outside was a military man who had obviously knocked on the wrong door. Well...Sydney was now very awake. We tried seeing if she'd go back to sleep but we were unsuccessful. So we all decided to go ahead and hit the road.