2021 IL, MO, AR, AL, MS, TN, GA, KY Vacation

Since we didn't know what the code situation would look like, we decided that we would just start hitting some states that we've never been to. Mississippi and Alabama were two of them that stuck out as a sore thumb on our map because we had been to most of the states surrounding them so we chose a route and planned on hitting something in every state. What an interesting vacation and we had so much fun. 

I was looking at a blog and saw that

Arkansas has some fun gem mining places. We decided to go there since it's more rural and fewer people. 

Fist stop, grandma and grandpa's!! 

As we were driving to St louis, we saw an interesting sign on the side of the road. It was a cute little city of the world's largest...

I knew we had a pretty decent camp site viewing in St louis. We were able to see all of the Arch from our campground, and walk about a mile and a quarter right to it. If it weren't 97°, it would have been much more enjoyable although we loved our time there. 

We did a lot of walking around the city. Easily over 10 miles each day, and aside from the heat and thirst, the boys almost never complained. Even Atlas walk without complaining this entire trip pretty much. We walked all over got to see the baseball field, a lot of sculptures, and went to the coolest museum called City Museum that we spent many hours at. 

After a few nights in Kansas city, we drove to the middle of nowhere in arkansas. There were no highways so it took us about 9 hours. I think. It's been about 2 months since then. I kept googling something interesting to see, like I normally do on road trips, but it only came up as being billed the world's loneliest highway. We did get to see some planes crop dusting the fields so that was pretty cool. But the trip felt like it was 14 hours. 

Our AR stop was that a place called Ron Coleman's Crystal mining. They have a commercial mining business and then take all the leftovers and just dump it and you pay a small amount of money and can dig through the piles of dirt to find your own treasures.  This was the highlight for atlas. I knew it would be. We didn't tell the boys where we were going until we got close, actually, we bought a whole bunch of things for mining and gave them one thing at a time to see if they could guess. It wasn't until atlas got to pick ax that he realized what it was. Ares had known the secret for a few months he did a great job keeping it quiet.

A New FIREPLACE!

We added a fireplace! And I love love love it!!

In my and Adam's first house we had a gas fireplace and we used it everyday in the winters, once Ares was tall enough to reach the light switch he turned it on every day no matter what the season.

When we were house shopping a fireplace was first or second on my list of must-haves (tied with a large bathtub), but the house we ended up with checked every other box on Adam's list and mine except for the fireplace. 

I don't promise that someday will put in a fireplace. Ideally we would have gotten one that pushed out of the house instead of coming into the house, but where Ryan put the power line to the house it would not work out. I think I'm glad about that though, because this is a real statement in the living room. And I LOVE it. 

The contractor that installed it forgot to support the floor, so he has to come back to reinforce the floor joists, and the logs and the Mirrored piece in the back are on backorder, so we can't run it for a long period of time, but still.... I HAVE A FIREPLACE!! AND ITS **REALLY** NICE!!!

and last weekend it was a beautiful day and perfect bonfire night. 

2020 Photo Dump - Year in Review.

I tried to do an all year dump however I was only able to grab photos up to the beginning of May. and it took me hours. A little frustrating, however this is a good idea of what are your looks like somewhat out of order.

Everyone talks about how much they hated 20/20, and while having all of our concerts canceled sucked really badly, I absolutely loved having the boys at home with me. Ares thrived working remotely, teaching Atlas has been kind of fun, he's a really smart kid and although sometimes it's difficult controlling him, he does great work when he can concentrate.  Parents are fighting our school district to get them back in the classroom.