On the Road Again

We left home at 11:15 this morning for a trip to Illinois to visit my family. It's been six years since we've been there. Thankfully, my parents have been willing to travel down here, and that has been much simpler than taking long trips with all the kids. However, they are getting older and my dad has had several surgeries in the past year. So, it's getting more difficult for them to drive all this way. Dad hates to fly, too. So, we're expecting to be doing a lot more traveling to Illinois in future years. It's much easier to travel since the kids aren't so little, but it's also getting more and more difficult to fit a long trip into our schedules.

We are making the trip in order to help my parents celebrate their 80th birthdays. Dad was 80 on June 16, and Mom will turn 80 on September 13. It was totally impossible to go twice in such a short time, so we picked a time in between the two. We usually don't travel at all during the summer, so this is strange to us. We hope to do some fun things while in the St. Louis area. Our museum passes are good for two different science centers in the area that we've never visited before, unbelievably. And we'll probably make a trip to the zoo. We've been up in the Arch several times, so we probably won't do that again until Carys is bigger.

While we're there, we'll also be celebrating our 20th anniversary, so we plan to eat somewhere on The Hill, an area of St. Louis famous for its Italian food. We can't wait! I've never eaten at a single restaurant on The Hill despite growing up in the area. Ridiculous!

Hopefully, I'll have some pictures to post this week.