Day 1 -- Leaving for Missouri

June 19, 2009 marked the beginning of our first family road trip...well, our first family of THREE road trip, that is.

Well, it seems Kenny and I really can't take a day off without visiting some doctor's office. This time a visit to Kenny's ENT at Northwestern started off our 9 day vacation to Missouri and Kansas. The GREAT news from that appointment is that Kenny's nose (where they entered his brain to remove the tumor last year) is completely healed from the surgeries and we are DONE with that doctor. He was fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's great to say goodbye and thanks to a doctor. We LOVE good news!

That morning, just as we left for Northwestern some horrible storms blew in and really made our drive down to Chicago awful...and even the ride home too. Luckily, we weren't on much of a strict schedule to leave for St. Louis after returning from Northwestern. We didn't hit the road until close to 5pm.

We weren't sure how Charlie would handle long car rides so we split the 10 hour drive to Branson up into two days. The first day, we just wanted to get to St. Louis. Since we left so late in the day, we stopped in DeKalb for dinner. Charlie was starving and we thought it might get him to calm down and go to sleep for the boring drive through Illinois. We decided on Pizza Villa to get some yummy beer nuggets...how can you not go to DeKalb and not get beer nuggets??!!

Charlie...so happy to be out of the car and at Pizza Villa for some food!

Trying his first bites of DeKalb beer nuggets.

Kenny showing Charlie how to eat a beer nugget.

After leaving DeKalb, we really hoped to cruise to St. Louis. Charlie wasn't too excited for the drive and Kenny and I both thought this whole driving long distances with an almost one year old might be a bad idea. There were still storms though during the evening drive, making it longer than it should have been and I think we would both agree to blame the fussy Charlie on the storms.

Driving down Route 39...as boring as Illinois traveling can be, there was something so peaceful about starting our vacation out with views like this.

A rainbow!

After some tense moments driving, we arrived in St. Louis at the downtown Hilton, just blocks from the river at about midnight. Much, much later than planned, but they welcomed us and we welcomed a dry place for the night. Charlie was ready to party! We let him burn some energy crawling around the room while we found what we needed for the night.

Charlie showing off standing up in his pack n play.