The Worst Planned Trip Ever....

Back in June when we first moved here I knew that we'd be going home to Minnesota in October for my college roomie's wedding. I stalked ticket prices and to my amazement....found round trip tickets for $78 a person! AMAZING!  Booked them instantly and walked away feeling pretty smug that I'm basically the queen of booking cheap travel.  Ha.

So a couple days later I go into my email to write down our flight times in my new calendar and I see an email from Priceline titled "Your October trip to Omaha." Omaha?! What. THE. Hell.  Yeah I'm an idiot and bought us tickets from Denver to OMAHA! Not Minneapolis! I had been looking at ticket prices for a friend and somehow that must have stayed plugged in to my searches. I couldn't believe it. I'm always so, so careful when booking tickets!  After many tears, calls to Frontier to beg them to switch my tickets (no sympathy just $500 to change them), and many more tears we just decided it was meant to be. We'd fly to Omaha, see our friends there, rent a car, drive to Minnesota, drive back to Omaha, and then fly home. Inconvenient but we'd get to see our family and friends in both places. No biggie.

Until I looked into boarding Rascal (our diabetic dog). Ha, we're not in Omaha anymore. $300 later plus the cost to rent the car, gas, park at the airport, yeah not going to happen. So at the very last minute we decided to have Brian fly with the kids (we were flying Frontier who now charges for carry-ons, but with Brian being active duty military the fees are waived), forfeit my ticket, and I would drive from Colorado Springs to Omaha with Rascal, pick them up at the airport, and then we would drive to Minnesota. Sound a little crazy? Yeah we're just that crazy to do just that.

That Wednesday morning I set my alarm for a horrifying 2:45 am and was in the car with the dog by 3 am. Eastern Colorado is so, so very boring, especially in the dark. But the sunrise was pretty. I know, I know don't take pictures driving. There was literally no one on the road for miles and I was super, super careful. I know, no excuse.

Brian had to wake the kids up at 5 am, get them in the car, to a parking lot outside of Denver to catch a shuttle to the airport, with both car seats no less. He was thrilled. The kids were excited though! This was after Brady puked in Brian's car. Thank goodness it was only carsickness from Brian's bucket seats in his car. We could not have dealt with a stomach virus, no way. Superman that husband of mine is.

After 9 hours of driving for me, and 1 hour of flying plus hours at both airports for Brian and the kids we were together again. 

We met up with our dear friends for a little fun at the Nebraska/Iowa border before hitting the road to Minnesota.

They were seriously so, so cute together and so happy to see each other after 3 months!

We hit the road and through Iowa we went. It's weird, but being back in the Midwest was just so refreshing. It's crazy how much I miss it, especially since we live in such a beautiful state. But they're beautiful in different ways. It was good to see cornfields and all of the beautiful changing leaves again.

We made it to Minnesota at about 7:00 that night. The kids were champs, seriously they were so great, considering we'd all been traveling for 12+ hours. We played for a little bit and then konked out. Hard.

The next morning it was my 29th Birthday!!

I started off the morning with a run. Because, 10k training quits for nothing. My parent's neighborhood is beautiful in the fall. So many changing leaves!  Where I COULD BREATHE!! Nothing like being at 719 feet above sea level compared to 7,000 ft back in Colorado.  I got lost and ended up at the new outlet mall. Whoops?

 And what did I want to do for my 29th birthday?

Go to an apple orchard. Because nothing says "I'm a crazy cool new 29 year old" like going to an apple orchard.

It was pretty neat though.

The kids had a blast finding apples and just running around.

It really was an adorable apple orchard.

These goats were crazy.

After the apple orchard we went to Brian's parent's house and then went to downtown Minneapolis for dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was a nice little birthday!

I don't want to bombard you with all of the pictures from our trip in 1 post so I'll write more tomorrow about our worst planned trip ever! :)