Holbrook -- Part 1

So, I had this whole blog about our trip to Holbrook all typed up and then my stinking computer froze up on me yesterday. However, I snuck in here to do some stuff for Primary and the kids have miraculously left me alone so maybe I can get this up today after all. (Of course as soon as I typed that Ellie started screaming something and I hear them running down the hall. . . oh, they’re laughing, all is good).

My good friend Susan is from the itsy bitsy town of Holbrook. It’s up in the part of the state where the summers are actually bearable so we’ve always talked about going up for a week when school was out. So the time came, I hemmed and hawed, but decided last minute to go for it. So we packed up our 5 kids in her Sequoia and headed off on the three hour drive. It was full of all the fun road trip things you remember as a kid – fights, peeing in bottle, trying to keep the babies awake until we stopped for lunch, are we there yets. . . but just fancier now because all the kids have to be strapped in to the most uncomfortable car seats imaginable. At least we had the DVD players.

Now Susan had told me she lived on a farm, but being a city girl, all a farm means to me is that it has a horse, maybe a cow or two. I didn’t realize she really meant a farm. Her dad owns well over 10,000 acres which is littered with thousands of cows and goats, a few horses, some of those bee boxes you always see on tv and lots and lots of trees. If you look at the picture of Nate, you can see part of her dad’s land in the back. It stretches all the way down to the river, and then East and West for miles. And yes, I realize Nate is happy in the picture. He didn’t cry the WHOLE time we were there. Just 80% of the time we were outside.

The trip can best be described as fun peppered with moments of disaster. I don’t know how we could have expected any less with our combination of kids. We rode horses, ate breakfast at the truck stop (you can see it in the distance in the picture of Nate), climbed hay, chased cats and dogs, got dirty, went swimming in the river (which is a blog all of its own), got lost, let the kids run wild. . . just did the whole country living thing.

One of Holbrook’s claims to fame (or maybe its only?) is the Wig Wam motel. I guess right before we came up, Oprah had been in town and came to visit them. She did not stay in them in case you were wondering. In front of the Wig Wams, they’ve parked a bunch of old cars like from the movie Cars so the kids were dying to go see “Doc” and “Sally” and “Mater.” It was definitely one of those moments of disaster – the kids were all bickering and Nate was crying because it was windy – but the pictures turned out kind of cute. And that’s all that matters right?