Finally on the Road

After months of planning and counting down the days until the final day of work we are officially "on the road".  We started out Friday June 15 with a trip with all the Idaho Falls cousins to the zoo & McKenna's birthday #1 party.  Here is the birthday girl with her favorite new doll gift.

Steve helped Russell pick up his new drift boat from the Hyde boat factory Friday and they went for a float on the Snake River for the maiden voyage.
After "blogging lessons" from Katrina, I met Katie for lunch and then we proceeded to the Jefferson County Rodeo to see the Rodeo Queens that come to Russell's office for their braces and the rodeo of course.

Sunday morning we begin the first stage of the "things not seen before" portion of the trip. We spent Sunday night in Missoula at a trailer park with free cable TV and suffered through the Thunder game. Dad enjoyed all the phone calls for Father's Day. 
Monday we stopped in Spokane to visit a cousin on my mother's side of the family & gathered lots of awesome old family pictures and personal histories. Dad used the new traveling scanner/printer we brought with us and it did a fantastic job. My cousin & I just sorted through old pictures and handed him what we wanted copied.  We also copied some discs she had from a different cousin of old family pictures I did not have.  It was a very worthwhile stop. 
We traveled on through the rain to Grand Coulee Dam a very amazing engineering feat. We enjoyed the visitors center and parked right down town behind the Indian casino with the RV. Dad with his usual gift of gab made friends with an old timer with no teeth and then a lady who saw our Utah plates and had to talk about her grankids in Utah.  Then we had dinner and there was a knock at the door - I was sure it was going to be the cops telling us to not part our RV in the middle of town. But it was the Mormon Grandma lady who had come back with her husband who was a retired power plant operator to take us back over to the dam to watch the laser light show on the dam at 10 pm.  The show was quite impressive with the Columbia River as the "narrator" telling the story of the power of his water through giant speakers and the laser images on the face of the dam.  The spillways were open so there was lots of water roaring over the dam as well.

We feel so fortunate and blessed to be able to share this adventure together. We will keep you posted with more accounts and pictures as we go along.