8 days and 34 hours

  We recently returned from our longest family road trip together.  It was exhausting, but educational and lots of fun!  We traveled through atleast parts of 8 states in 8 days!  Our first stop was Springfield, Illinois, where we visited some of the Abraham Lincoln sites.  It was inspiring to learn about this president and come to appreciate all that he suffered mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, to help our country through probably it's most difficult time to date and I loved reading how he relied on the Lord for his decisions.  The first two picture are in/of his home.  Shelten wasn't too happy about not being able to touch all of the antiques on this trip, thus you will see that he has his binky in just about every picture, and even then there were still lots of not so fun moments with him :).

The Lincoln Presidential Museum is the largest of the presidential museums and was very kid friendly and well done!  Here we are posing with the Lincoln family.  (They are mannequins, if you can't tell).

  Our next stop was Kirtland, Ohio where we were able to visit some sites that are important to our church's history.  I can't imagine living in some of the small little houses with 10 + people in them!

 We stopped at an Amish town and got some yummy cheese, and other necessities.

  Found a fun train to play on that was made out of all recycled plastics.  Good place to get out those car wiggles!

  Our next stop was Niagra Falls.  I think the kids pictured Multnomah Falls when we told them we were stopping to see a waterfall, and were amazed at the size of this natural wonder!

We got to Palmyra, New York a few hours before the Hill Cumorah Pagent, which is a wonderful play portraying scenes from the Book of Mormon.  We all really enjoyed this; the kids sat through it really well and I think it helped them understand the scriptures better as they watched some of the scenes play out that we read and talk about.

  The cast members walk around in costume before it starts, which was fun.  Everyone was so friendly.

 We got to go to church next door to where our church was first organized and take a tour and imagine what that would have been like.  Some of the kids may or may not have had a hard time being quiet and respectful during all of these tours, but we won't mention any names................

  Later we got to walk through the Sacred Grove, a very special place that started the gospel being restored to the earth.

  This also happened to be someone's birthday.  Kelston's now 5!  He's such a sweetie and was so easy going about his birthday being anything but the typical way we spend birthdays.

   Pretty sure we would not have survived this trip without the binky.  Good thing we love this boy!

I know this picture is blurry, but I love how it captures Kelston's true smile, this is not captured on camera very often.  His smile is absolutely infectious and contagious!!

After New York, we had a long day of driving.  We realized along the way that we would be driving right by where the Columbus, Ohio temple was, so we stopped and stretched our legs as we walked around this temple.

This small temple had some of the most colorful and beautiful grounds I've seen.

 We also stopped in St. Louis on our way home and saw the "oldest American city," Cahokia.  It was amazing how these huge mounds of dirt are still around after almost 200 years and all of the artifacts they have collected from the area.

  Although the view at the top of the tallest mound was pretty, I loved this view, walking behind daughter and father even more!

 Some of us were eager to get home after 8 busy long days of traveling, and so we did a quick walk by of the Arch instead of going inside.

  One of the highlights of our trip was being able to go to the Indianapolis temple open house.  This was the first time our kids had experienced this, and it was special to be altogether as a family in the temple.  Check out the pictures of the inside of the temple here: http://mormontemples.org/eng/temple/indianapolis-indiana.  It was amazingly beautiful!!

   Upon returning home, Kelston got to open a few more birthday presents that weren't able to come along on the trip with us.  His favorite was chalk paint.  It was so fun, most of it's gone already.  Not clean, but very fun!  And he was so kind to share it with siblings and neighbors!

 I think I now need a vacation to recover from that fun but exhausting vacation!!!