Missouri Vacation Day 5 & 6 (Wordful Wednesday)

I've been having computer issues so I've neglected my blog.  Luckily tech support, aka my husband, was able to fix it! :)

Here are the last vacation pics from our trip.  We drove home through St. Louis and spent a day there.
We went to the zoo...

Their zoo has a build a bear in it with exclusive animals so this was Claire's treat on the trip.  She got to get a new animal that you can't get anywhere else!  She picked a leopard.

We stopped by to see the Cathedral Basilica.  It is beautiful!!  I don't have good pictures of the inside because they were about to have a confirmation mass so we just peeked in for a few minutes.

We were told to go to Ted Drewes for some frozen custard.  Yum!!!!

We also took the Anheiser Busch Brewery Tour.  It was a great tour.  I told Chris it was his reward for going to the zoo earlier in the day. :)

They have an awesome facility!

 

And an awesome hospitality room!

We were in St. Louis the day that the tornado hit Joplin.  We had to drive through Joplin the next day.  We passed a huge caravan of ambulances and emergency help vehicles on their way there.

My heart goes out to all of the people there.  The destruction was awful. We were just on the interstate so we didn't see the main damage, but there was damage all around the interstate.  Trees and billboards were just snapped in half.  And they were getting more storms as we drove through.

We actually drove most of the way from St. Louis to Tulsa in heavy thunderstorms.  We considered staying in St. Louis an extra day, but there were tornadic thunderstorms in the forecast for the next day so we decided to just drive through the regular thunderstorms.  Thank goodness for modern weather forecasting.  Since the storms don't build up until the afternoon we were able to leave Tulsa and drive home the last day and get in before the tornadic storms hit.  And there were tornadoes that night.  Several touched down here in north Texas and Oklahoma.  Pretty much all the places we had been earlier in the day!  Our sirens went off, but we didn't have a tornado.

Our trip was great, but after the drive back, we were very thankful to be home and safe!

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by seven clown circus and Parenting by dummies.

Missouri Vacation Day 4 (Wordful Wednesday)

The fourth day of our vacation took us to Springfield, Illinois.  We wanted to see all of the Lincoln things.

This is Lincoln's Tomb:

I felt honored to pay my respects to such a great man and president.

This is Lincoln's house.  Its the only house the Lincolns ever owned.  They have done a great job at preserving it.  They even have the whole street preserved with his neighbor's houses as well.

Inside of the house...the desk in the corner was Lincoln's actual desk.  The tour guide said he loved that desk.  One time a leg broke and Mary threw it out.  Abe found someone to fix it and brought it back in!  Lots of great speeches were probably written on that desk.  It seems really small for such a big man.

Us in front of the capitol...

at the Illinois state museum...

(which is free, by the way!)

The church we went to.  It was beautiful!

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

One more post to do about our vacation...I'll try to get to it tomorrow.

Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Seven Clown Circus and Parenting by Dummies.  Sorry, my links aren't working today. :(

L.E.N.S. Photo Challenge

The L.E.N.S. photo challenge is hosted by Jen at Home is where you start from.

This week's theme is Dreamy Black and White.

This is a picture from our recent vacation to Hannibal, MO. It was taken at the Mark Twain museum. When my husband saw it on the preview screen of the camera he commented that it would look good in black and white. So, when I saw this week's them I had to try it. He was right...it does look good in black and white!

Postcard Friendship Friday #74

Here are more postcards from our recent vacation. These are from Hannibal, MO, home of Mark Twain. The first one is his childhood home (built by his father) complete with that famous whitewashed fence from Tom Sawyer!


This one is a postcard of the famous whitewashing scence with Tom. Its the same fence that's in the first postcard. It was painted by a local Hannibal artist named Martha Mudd Adrian.

It was great seeing all of the places that influenced Twain so much. If you'd like to see more of our adventures in Hannibal click the following link or just scroll down.

http://aimeesland.blogspot.com/2011/05/missouri-vacation-day-2.html

Postcard Friendship Friday is hosted by Beth at www.thebestheartsarecrunchy.blogspot.com .

I have a favor to ask of all of my PFF friends (as well as all my other friends too!)...

As you may know, I homeschool my children. My daughter is going to be in 3rd grade next year and will study the 50 states. She's my challenging child so I try to do as much as I can to make learning fun for her. So, she is trying to collect postcards from each of the 50 states. If you'd be willing to help her out we'd really appreciate it! Just send me an email saying you'd like to help and I'll send you the address. If you'd like, send us your address too and we'll send a Texas postcard back to you! My email: aimeesland@sbcglobal.net Thanks so much!!

Missouri Vacation Day 3

On the third day of our trip Nathan was feeling good and ready to get out and have some fun! The rain held off until that evening so we got in everything we wanted to do in Hannibal. Hannibal is such a great little town!

The first thing we did was to tour all of the homes on the Mark Twain house tour. Here are the kids in the fireplace at Huck's house.


We also got to take a sightseeing cruise on the Mark Twain Riverboat. It was great and...

we were invited into the Captain's quarters and the kids got to help steer the ship into port!

After the river cruise we ate at a restaurant on the river. Claire was absolutely thrilled that she got to color on the table! Evidently, she'd never been at a restaurant that let her do that before!

After lunch we headed over to the Mark Twain Cave. We toured the cave. It was great.

Very neat to be in the actual cave that Mark Twain played in as a kid and the one he wrote about in Tom Sawyer. I plan to do a separate post about the cave so the book club kids that read the book can see just what Twain was talking about.

And what mom doesn't love to take pictures of her kids with their heads sticking out of little holes making them look like other characters? I know I do!

I bought a family pass for the cave which included a little panning for gems for each of the kids.

And also a candle dipping for each one of them...

My husband and I finished the tour with a wine tasting!

Then, we headed over to the Mark Twain museum to finish our tour. This is part of the home tour, but we saved it until later in the day when it was suppose to be raining. That's just what happened, too, so we were glad we waited! The museum is really nice!

We ended the day at a fabulous little restaurant called The Brick Oven. Best pizza I've ever had! And I tried a great wine there too. My only regret is that I didn't buy a bottle. Now, I have to hunt it down!

Well, that's it for day 3. The next day we headed to Springfield Illinois to see all of the Lincoln stuff.

To read about the first 2 days of our trip you can click the link that says "missouri vacation" at the end of this post. It should pull up the other posts.

Missouri Vacation Day 2

On the second day of our trip the plan was to drive to Hannibal and take the Mark Twain Riverboat cruise and do some sightseeing. Well, things don't always go as planned!

That morning Nathan said he didn't feel good. Nathan...the one who is NEVER sick! The one who hasn't thrown up in at least 6 years. Well, he was sick. We think it was food poisoning. Thankfully, no one else got it. But it changed our plans a little bit. We ended up getting into Hannibal much later than we had planned. By the time we finally got there Nathan was feeling ok. We missed the boat...literally. The riverboat cruised at 1:30 and we didn't get in until around 3:00. I was worried that there would be storms the next day and it wouldn't cruise and we would miss it completely, but it all ended up working out all right.

Since Nathan was feeling better when we got into town we went ahead and did some sightseeing. Here are the kids in front of the Mark Twain House.
This is the Becky Thatcher house...real home to Laura Hawkins, Mark Twain's childhood sweetheart. They are right across the street from each other.

Here are the kids whitewashing that famous fence Twain wrote about!

We climbed to the top of Cardiff Hill to see this lighthouse. Great views of the Mississippi from here!

This is the view from only half way up. The Mississippi was pretty full!

That night we ate at a great little restaurant on Main St. called the Ole Planter's Restaurant. They had really good homecooked food. Poor Nathan...all he ate was bread and crackers!

Stay tuned for more adventures of our Missouri Family Vacation!

Postcard Friendship Friday #73

We just got back from vacation so boy, do I have postcards! The first day of our vacation we drove through Oklahoma and Kansas to Kansas City, MO. We didn't stop anywhere in Oklahoma that I could buy postcards, but we did stop at a mega mart gas station thing in Kansas so I got some there. I had never been to Kansas before. All I really saw was interstate though. Here's one of my favorite cards. I like cards with the state and then different stuff all about the state on them. :)



And I thought this one was appropriate for Memorial Day Weekend...



Postcard Friendship Friday is hosted by Beth at The Best Hearts are Crunchy.

Missouri Vacation Day 1

We just got back from a great family vacation to Missouri. We went lots of places. This is what we did on the first day...

We drove to Kansas City. We took the kids to eat at Fritz's . It was really cool. A train delivers your food. The kids loved that!

After dinner we went to a Royals game. We lucked out...the Rangers were playing the Royals the day we were going to be there. It was neat to watch our home team in a different stadium!

Of course, we all wore our Ranger shirts!

Kaufman stadium was really nice. This is a view from inside their Hall of Fame...

We stayed in KC just one night. The next day we headed to Hannibal, MO. (Which was our original destination for this vacation) I'll post about that when I have more time.