Road Trippin Part 5: Volcanoes and The Rest of the Trip

We left the Grand Canyon National Park on Monday afternoon, after the girls earned their Junior Ranger badges for that park. We stopped at a museum/Native American dwelling ruins on the way out...

...and made one more stop to view the Canyon from a watchtower...

Then it was on to Sunset Crater, where the girls earned their third badge.

This was the neatest place. It is the remains of a volcano that erupted 1000 years ago.

Dried lava covered the ground. Though we couldn't remove any of the lava from the park, we were able to feel it and pick it up...

AK taking a little rest...

We are standing on a volcano!!!!!!!!!!

We did visit one other national monument, called Wupatki, which was a really neat old pueblo village. I didn't get pics of this one because Owen was napping in the van, so I stayed with him while Spencer and the girls explored. We didn't have much time there because it was close to closing time, but the girls did get to earn their fourth and final junior ranger badges. They were so proud.

So we left the Flagstaff area around 5:00 on Monday evening. We drove straight through the night again, and actually kept driving with just a few rest stops until about 10:00 the next night. We would have stopped sooner, but once again, the hotels were all full in the towns that we passed through. Who knew those small town hotels filled up so quickly? We landed in western Alabama and found a blessed little motel where we could dump our sleeping kids in the bed and crawl into bed ourselves.

The next morning we woke refreshed and finished our drive to the best destination of the whole trip: TRION, GA!!!!!

In other words, JUSTICE'S HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We played and visited at Bo and Bonnie and Justice's house for a little while; then Uncle Bo showed us around the church (it was so neat to see and hear how the Lord is working through Connect City in Summerville!)

Then we went out for pizza and headed back to their house to visit one more time before driving home sweet home!

What an amazing trip. What an amazing learning opportunity for the kids, and an awesome experience of working together and learning patience and seeing God's creation and realizing just how much our kids can handle. They grew in courage and perseverance and I'm sure that we did too!

Some fun and random memories:

• Dance parties in the van
• Waking up at 2:30 in the morning to hear Spencer singing "You Raise Me Up" in a much higher voice than I thought he was capable of using, in order to stay awake while driving through the night
• Seeing the city lights of Dallas when driving through at 4:00 AM
• Owen swearing he saw a dinosaur in New Mexico
• Finding random places to heat up our supper while we were on the road (We brought enough meals from home to last us through the whole trip, which worked out awesome!)
• Owen's new favorite phrase whenever he saw a bench or a picnic table: "That's a good spot for a sandwich."
• Watching Claire overcome some serious fears
• Hearing AK say "I've been waiting like 10 hours" every.single.time she had to pee.
• Realizing that the girls would have been just as happy if we had only gone to see Justice and left out the entire rest of the trip

Can't wait to do it all again one day! Here's to road trippin'!!!!!!