Vaca 2021, Day 1 - Driving, & More Driving

Ah, the kickoff of the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Units 2021 road trip blogposts!  I will start by saying that my wife, Mama Chaos, is THE BEST planner on the face of God's green Earth!!!  We vacation HARD, meaning there are some tough days of driving but we have the best times and stuff goes down mostly as expected.  My role is driving, and driving hard, to make things happen as they should.  

While it was definitely a blessing, we have 4 people in the car, and all four of them on this vacation are available drivers!  I LOVE driving, but when you drive 1030 miles to get home on the last day, that's a bit much for one fella, so we did some switching out and whatever, but we did it!!!

I am going to include a lot of parts of my hand written notes that I do when we're on vacation.  Hopefully it will tell a decent story.  Hopefully there will be a few educational parts of this as well, as we like to teach the boys stuff while we're showing them our beautiful country.  

Let's go!

From the journal:

Vacation 2021, Day 1

Mama had to work this particular weekend, so it was my job to pack up the van and be ready to go when she got home!  This also required me to deliver the dogs to my sisters farm as that is where they'll be living the next two weeks.  While dropping them off, I had taken them into the house and returned to the vehicle to grab one of their containers of food.  When I went back out to get the other hound's food, I saw that it had fallen out of the back of the van, into the gravel in their driving, spilling everywhere...  I don't have time for this $h!+!!!   

Back home we go...

We left Pleasant Hill around 2:30pm.  Our fist stop was in Kearney, Missouri to get gas, stretch our legs and frankly, relieve ourselves.  Once everyone was back to comfortable, we piled back into the van... on thru KC, Lawrence, Topeka, Emporia, El Dorado (while singing The Eagles Desparado at the top of my lungs!), Witchita and finally stopping in Blackwell, OK.

What did we discover when we got out of the vehicle at the Holiday Inn Express, you may be asking?  Well, we discovered that Ted, and Ted alone, failed to load Mama Chaos's suitcase into the van prior to vacating Pleasant Hill!!!  NOT GOOD!

Luckily, her shoes (that weren't on her feet) were packed into the bottom of Rob's bag, and her meds were packed into a bathroom bag, both of which, were present and accounted for!  If I were a liar, I would tell you that I thought this was funny, but I'm not a liar.  I seriously wanted to bawl!  Vaca had just started and my failure reared it's ugly head in a really big way!

There was a Wal Mart just 3 miles down the road that was open for another hour, so once we got the included luggage up to the room, we headed there for a new, swanky wardrobe for Mama's vaca.  Rob stayed behind in the room.  

Caleb found a nice, hot pink, two-piece bikini that he was going to buy me (with my money!) for my birthday. He was nearly pee'ing himself laughing.  He got me a Snickers bar instead, thank God.

Back to the hotel we went with a $100 receipt of my stupidity and we stopped at the Braun's that was adjacent to the hotel.

Not a great start...

The next 10 photos are the itinerary that me bride created for the boys to follow along with as we went. Did they use them?  No...  for the most part.  They still asked questions about what was on the docket for tomorrow and so on.  But, massive, massive credit to Mom for putting this together!

The biggest surprise of day 1's driving was the Flint Hills (or here,  or here...)in Kansas.  We saw a fairly large sign, the kind you see when you're entering a different state, from quite a distance away. Nothing was out of the ordinary at the time, fields with tree's and just normal landscape, then we finally got close to the sign and it said, "Welcome to the Flint Hills".   Okay, what does that mean?

It means that you're driving thru one of the very last prairie lands in the U.S.  The entrance was on the crest of a hill, and once you went over that hill, the tree's mostly disappeared and you saw stuff like this for miles and miles!

This picture was taken for our friend Melissa.  She's a bit of an ice cream fanatic and other peeps from our couples group had sent pictures of places they were visiting and stopped for ice cream.  Caleb is not one to wait around and ask for permissions, so by the time that I suggested taking a picture for Melissa, he had taken the top completely off of the cone and mom didn't want to send an unimpressive picture.  But this is providing evidence that it exists!

 

Evening Walk At Thomas Mitchell Park

Not much to say about these pictures other than it was a mostly beautiful evening with the exception of the high humidity!  It wasn't that bad out in the open but when we get back on the tree lined trails, it got a bit hard for me to breathe.

 

4th of July Corn Pic, 2021

 

Bacon Wrapped Tots!

This was my first attempt at them and they were pretty good.  I wanted to have a chance to experiment a bit before I took them out in public (4th of July party).

The same tots with some fine aged cheddar on the right of the photo and some pepper jack on the left.  The top was my first attempt at brat-pats (bratwurst patties).

This is the ever-loyal Juno who dialed in on exactly where the tots lived while I was making them for the 4th.  She groaned a few times...  lol!

 

Vaca 2020 - Final Day - Mammoth Caves

Mammoth Caves is one of our favorites as it holds a great memory for Mama and I.  I don't remember what cave we were in this time, but it was the only one that was open during the 'Rona.  The first time we visited was before we had critters and we did the 4-hour guided tour with lunch in the "snowball room".  Aptly named as it appeared to have snowballs all over the ceiling of this wide open area that had a fully staffed cafe in it.  I remember eating a very good bowl of soup in the snowball room and thinking how odd it was that the soup was warming me up.  Such is time in a cave.

Again, I don't have a ton of stuff to say here as I don't recall many details since it happened 11 months ago.

I loved seeing the old abandoned tools that were left behind over the years.

Not really handicap accessible, is it!?

I have no idea what happened with this picture but it's cool looking!  I think there were people with "Miner hats" on with the lights on the helmet, moving in front of us and I may have moved the camera a bit too soon...  who knows?

This was sort of creepy.  It's at the furthest point you can get to in the cave.

I wish I could remember what these were for, for sure.  I want to say that they brought diseased peeps down here to isolate them, but I maybe dreamed that up too.  It's creepy whatever the reason was.

Rob was not going to allow his face to be photographed.  He had spent the last two weeks of his life wishing he was back home.

Uh?  Keep the ATV's out maybe?

Back to the top, and back to the heat to hit the road for the long drive back home!  Well,  we didn't drive all the way home... we stopped in Evansville, IN. and had probably the best pizza of our lives at Turoni's Pizza and Brewery!!!

The pizza was so good you never wanted it to end!

 

That concludes all of the 2020 vacation posts for the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Unit.  On to the current year, of which, I hope to have done in a much more timely fashion.

Couples Group From Church: Margarita Tour

This group makes me laugh!!  We all bring something SO different to the table but it's all good and for whatever reason, all seems so funny.  To me anyway.  We are missing one couple who is on vacation at this time.

When you spill an excellent margarita due to excessive ice in the pitcher (note: there should be NO ice!), you make up for it by utilizing the nearest straw!  Good work Dan!

Nora with the house bands guitar player!

Lance trying to preserve tortilla chips once we realized we had to pay once we ate our way beyond a certain point!

 

Waiting for a table at Rita's Cantina.  This is my favorite photo as Steve, upper right, was being chastised by Melissa, in the foreground, and he said just before this was snapped, "Ok, I'll stand there, but I'm going to scowl.".  LOL.

It was a fun night and we'll have more of them, I'm sure.