back to the real world...

Something I learned today: playing on waterslides is so much more fun than reading/responding to nearly 100 e-mails.

I just returned from a 10-day road trip with my sister and her family to Texas. Her husband is in the Ohio National Guard and spent the past 3 months training there. With only 4 days of leave over Easter before heading to the Middle East, it was much easier to visit him in Texas than to fly him home. Travel alone would eat up most of 2 days. I went along with my sister and their 4 children to be a 2nd driver and babysitter as needed.

It was a good trip. My sister and I get along pretty well and if I annoyed her at all, she didn't say anything. The kids did pretty well too. I seem to recall that my sibs and I were much more obnoxious on long road trips than my nieces and nephew were, though my mom says we weren't too bad either.

Besides seeing my brother-in-law, there were 3 really cool things that we did on the trip. One was to go to the Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, TX. I had not been on a waterslide since I was probably 10 years old. I forgot just how fast you can fly down those things! It was a lot of fun, though.

On the drive home, we stopped at 2 interesting spots. One was the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home in Mansfield, MO. The Little House books were favorites of both my sister and I, and now of her oldest daughter. The other place was the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, near St. Louis. It is a Native American cultural site.

Here is a self-portrait of me at the Great Wolf Lodge, with the waterslides and such in the background, taken with my cell phone. I'll post some other photos from the trip later.