My grandmother turned 90 years old this year! In honor of her birthday and the occasion, we headed off to Oklahoma to join in the festivities.
Me, Grandma & my Great Aunt Fae (who's 12 years younger)
My sister, Kellie, my niece, Alexandra, myself, Nikolas and Lukas drove to Oklahoma, which isn't anything too unbearable for Kellie, Alex and myself as we are all seasoned road trippers. The 2 and 4 year old, however, weren't terribly keen on driving long hours for 4 days straight each way. Considering, they did pretty well.
The long stretch of the panhandle,
"will it ever end?"
I kept thinking of "The Nothingness" from the "Neverending Story".
Good Morning!
Weirdo Child
Saw a lot of these
Grandma's neighbor's birthday present was giving her a ride home from her party on his motorcycle! Obviously, my grandmother is no ordinary ninety year old!
At least she wore a helmet,
unlike all the other crazy people in Oklahoma.
She did make it home safe, unfortunately, there wasn't anyone at her house to help her off like they helped her on so as the neighbor was holding the bike up she started to get off and FELL OFF! Just what a 90 year old needs. The neighbor then dropped his bike to help Grandma so then the bike fell, luckily in the other direction. No broken anything, amazingly!
That was just one of many events to help her remember her 90th as on her actual birthday a couple days before she was locked out of her house at 10:30pm in the pouring rain! Thankfully, the same neighbor with the motorcycle was able to get a window open and crawl in. She really does have crazy and funny things happen to her often and we are all just amazed that she is still in perfect health. She only just recently stopped driving and is finally considering moving into a retirement community. Until then, we'll continue to hear about her falling off ladders, getting stuck in the bathtub, slipping off the silk sheets and becoming wedged between her bed and the wall and various other disastrous events to most elderly but not to this one.
After just four days visiting Grandma, we packed our van and took off for home. We had a few cool stops that I will post pictures of next, but these three were of the actual driving part.
Nik and Aunt Kellie cleaning the windows as we could barely see after each day from all the moths, bugs, bees and butterflies splatting against our windshield.
Oh, and did I mention: Birds!
Whoever heard of a bird getting stuck in one's headlight?!
I'll admit. I was the one driving this round. We were watching this swarm of birds flying towards us and they all veered over the car, but not this little one. We were yelling, "Pull Up, Pull Up!", but apparently he didn't hear us. We did impress the gas station attendant, and I would think they have seen everything. We also drove the next 1000 miles home with little birdie as our head ornament. Kellie let Chad deal with the extraction:)
I think that is the last 4000 plus mile trip I'll be taking with the boys for at least another couple years. It would be nice if
one of them could read!
These cliff dwellings are actually reconstructions of the original, though they did use the original stone and built them in the same dimensions and layouts as the original which were located in Mesa Verde. This was done because of the looting and destruction going on. The nice thing about this being a reconstruction is that the stones were put back together with concrete mortar instead of the mud/clay mortar used by the Anasazi. Now people can walk and climb through the dwellings and not worry about the stones coming crashing down on top of anyone. That is nice. 
This was a great reminder to me that there are so many places within a couple days of driving that will be fun and wonderful history lessons for my children. Not to mention for me!
