Our Vacation, Part 1

So, now that we have this awesome new minivan, it makes taking trips a LOT easier. We'd been hoping all summer to take a vacation to St. Louis, and we'd been helped out by our AWESOME friends John and Nancy (who gave us a week in their time share condo that they would have lost otherwise), but we weren't loking forward to cramming the three kids in the back of the sporadically air-conditioned Taurus.

Thanks to my WONDERFUL in-laws, that problem was solved!

So we got up Saturday morning, August 8, because the kids like to be loaded into the car in their pajamas when it's still dark, and we drove northeast. It was a leisurely drive with no stress, no need to "make time," and very little fussing from the kids. We stopped for breakfast at McDonald's and got such good service that I had to call the manager over and let him know. We stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall used bookstore in St. James, and a gas station in some town that had Icees on sale for 25 cents.

For all of our dawdling, we were still at the condo in Farmington (about an hour south of St . Louis) by noon...and apparently check-in wasn't allowed until 4:00 (our bad--you have to read the fine print!). So we drove into the town and ate lunch at a pizza place called Bobarino's. It was incredible!

With time to kill, we wandered around the historic section of Farmington. We went into several antique shops (Farmington is a serious antiquers' paradise), a Christian bookstore (where David spent his own money on a balloon), and a very girlie boutique (which made David and Matt decide to just wait outside). These were all old shops, and you could tell that families used to live above them.

The French-settled areas of northeastern Missouri, most of which are along the Mississippi River, are very old settlements. They have old, beautiful Catholic churches and lots of French names and themes. Later in the week we went to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri (notice the French abbreviation of Sainte--the feminine form of Saint in French), which was another beautifully historic place.

So we finally went back to the resort, killed some time in the golfers' clubhouse (where you could only watch golf on TV--the kids weren't allowed to change the channel!), and finally were allowed into our room. Well, apartment, really--it was a one bedroom deal that was bigger than Matt's and my first couple of apartments! We unpacked, and I took the kids swimming at the condo pool.

It was a really nice start to the vacation. We did a ton of stuff, so there's more to come!