My BIG Summer Trip

[chrisinhouston]

Was it BIG? Oh yes.

My eldest decided he was done with living in Pennsylvania. He and his wife and 3 children had a nice home, he had a good paying job but lots of headaches with his job and he felt like he was not living his dream. So he began looking for a big change and ended up buying some land and a home in norther Idaho, about 50 miles from the Canadian border. There is a fairly well known town of Sandpoint about an hour from his new place. He called me up and asked if I would help the family move. He would drive the Toyota Sequoia with the family and I would drive the Toyota pickup with the family dog, a big well behaved black lab. We ended up having to also pull big U-Haul trailers since the mover underestimated and couldn't get everything in the truck.

We made a good but slow pace as we headed west from Hazleton PA through Chicago, the traffic was slow at times with construction and rain storms and we had to stop for the kids and dog a bit more than I prefer. They have 3 kids, a 5 year old boy and 8 month old twins, a boy and a girl. Mom figured out how to breast feed them in their car seats as they drove down the highway but we still usually stopped for a sit down lunch and the occasional gas fillup and diaper change.

Once we got into Wisconsin we picked up the pace as traffic was better. We took the southern route through South Dakota into Wyoming, Montana and then Idaho. I did most of the planning and booking for hotels looking for dog friendly ones using TripAdvisor.

We got to the new home and unpacked and returned out trailers and then went to my daughter in law's parents home near Seattle for a few days as we had to wait for the movers. My wife flew in and we went back and met the truck and spent a week helping get things unpacked and put away.

Overall it was a nice trip and after we were done with them we drove to Bremerton, Washington to visit with my daughter and her husband who just had had a baby boy a few weeks earlier. Flew home and set to editing pictures, here are a few.

1. As you can see the dog took up most of the seat he slept in as well as the shift console.
2. The road out ahead
3. At a roadside stop I watch some of the kids.
4. My one little granddaughter was an early riser so I would take her in my room while her mom got showered and the boys slept a bit longer. I set up a little studio on the bed for portraits