"Pride Of Super" and Heading Home! (Vacation Part 7)

Coming and going, Liberty did SO good in the car...

Ryan said you can tell she's my daughter, because she always has her legs in some "Gumby" postion!

Most of the time, she relaxed just like this...

And slept like that too!

So, we drove from Kentucky to St Louis where we planned on finding a hotel. (Sound familiar?)

Obviously, we didn't learn our lesson from the first day of our trip and just figured we'd find a hotel on the road.

After all, what were the chances that American Idol would be in the same town as us the very next weekend?

But the hotels in St Louis were full.  ALL FULL.

Only this time, it wasn't American Idol, instead it was some mid-states baseball tournament along with about a dozen different conferences.

"No big deal" we thought.  "Let's just drive onto the outskirt cities and we'll find a place in one of those towns."

Then it began POURING rain.  We were having to drive about 20mph because the rain was coming down so heavy and there was VERY little visability.

All the hotels on the out-skirt towns were filling up fast because weary travelers were trying to escape the rain and wait it out while they slept.

We ended up driving around looking for a hotel for about 3 hours!  We were all EXHAUSTED, especially our hubbys-the drivers!

This is around 1am, driving from hotel to hotel.

Which eventually turned into this:

We finally found a hotel with vacancy at 3:30am (notice the car clock in the next picture)

Normally, someone couldn't have paid me to stay in a hotel like this, but we were all half-asleep as it was and just thankful for shelter!

I was so releaved to see Ryan walk out of hotel with a thumbs up! 

3:35am

It was the type of hotel where...

~~you couldn't really understand the front desk workers (also the owners) but they seemed okay with the fact we had one family with 7 people to a room and another family with 6 people to a room.

~~the comforters in the room didn't match

~~you wanted to wear your shoes at ALL times

~~and you want to cover as much of your skin as possible while sleeping so as little of your skin as possible touched the bed.

BUT it was a bed.  And we were honestly thankful!  Especially since Ryan and Chad were having trouble staying awake there towards the end!

We woke up the next morning and noticed the hotel sign out front:

"Super-Super Clean.  Pride of Super"

Dear RodeWay Inn, I'll admit that I'm not really sure what "Pride of Super" means, yet even so, I think I have to disagree with that claim.

Breakfast at Hardee's before hitting the road...

Our sweet little crew...

We had not a single "hiccup" the whole way until we were about 20 miles away from home.

Ryan pulled up close to a horse trailer and started talking like "Mr. Ed" to the horse inside.

He was entertaining the boys (and me!) with his voices when BAM!  Something flew up from the trailer and hit the windsheild.

I was laughing too hard at Ryan's "Mr Ed" impression to even care...but Ryan was frustrated that just 20 miles from home we had our first tradgedy!

So no, that's not a bird or an airplane you see in the picture, it's a crack...

Thankfully, this was probably the worst thing that happened the whole trip. 

Over this week and a half, we made some wonderful memories and had such great family time!  I'll remember this vacation forever...I hope the boys will at least remember bits and pieces!  I'm so thankful for pictures to remind them of our adventures!!!

Thanks for joining me for these looks back on our awesome vacation!!!

I'm sure we have more adventures ahead of us...just around the corner!!!

So be sure to stay tuned!  There is rarely a dull moment where the Wheelers are concerned!!!