Theo's room was officially ready. Minus a few things like a bed, rug and his picture rail. But he has been ready to have his own room. It'll do until I can get a hand to put up the picture rail.

I left the fam for a few days for a work conference in Las Vegas. Besides our quick stop for lunch, a little over a week earlier, I had never been to Vegas before. It took me a few days to find my way around and get over the shock of "where am I?" One of my goals was to get close to the sphere. I had no idea how non-pedestrian friendly Vegas is outside of the strip. The wild wild west. Now you know why I've never wanted to go. Ha.    I did all the touristy things as one does. I would come back with the kids then probably never go back again. I'm on team "Boo, Vegas sucks" but I guess we could do it once. But why not just do Disney World at that point? No waiting 6 hours to go on one ride.  Ha. I have around 4 months to sand, prime and paint the north and south facades of our house. Better get started I suppose.

The kids requested waffles, which meant that I was making my go to oatmeal whole wheat variety  using our Nordic Ware pans of course . A stack of library books means it's library day. Blake was in town for his annual Teamsters gathering. We had to take him to our new favorite buffet, Q.Cumbers . Salad buffet and Veganopolis. A match made in heaven.     Blake needed to get comfortable after filling his belly.   Blake's just a big kid when he's around Theo and Meadow. They adore him.

  When we arrived in Death Valley it was 90F. The first thing we had to do was find a place to stay for the night.  Well, after we got Junior Ranger books of course. The campsites in Furnace Creek were booked but there were lots of openings at Stovetop Wells.  Furnace Creek is the only developed campground that takes reservations. The rest our first come first served. I wanted to stay near Mesquite Spring Campground, but we decided that was too far afield. Not our typical campsite, this was more like a parking lot, but we're just here to sleep so whatever.  Most of the campgrounds look something like this, but smaller. After paying for our campsite we got ready to hike and headed to the nearby sand dunes. This is the largest national park and everything is spaced far apart. We stayed close to our campsite and went over to the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes .  We got there just in time for a nice hike across the dunes during sunset. The kids loved it here.  It's funny how much more t

Day 1: Minneapolis - Ozawkie, KS After last years awesome, but incredibly expensive San Francisco to Portland campervan vacation , I didn't think we'd be doing one of those again for years. But then Brooke had a work trip to Las Vegas and wanted us to tag along. That didn't quite work, but while researching a weekend campervan rental, I found a great relocation deal from northern Iowa to San Francisco during the kid's spring break. It didn't take much to persuade Brooke. Since our West Coast trip with  Escape Campervan 's we found out that almost all of the campervan and RV rental companies need vehicles moved from time to time. They often offer 90% or more off normal rental rates. But we didn't realize that every spring many of the campervan rental agencies also need vehicles moved from mostly Midwest factories to all over the USA and Canada. Lucky for us the Winnebago factory in Northern Iowa cranks out a bunch of rental vans. We had three proposed routes