First Day of School 2017

This is the only year that both Max and Lily will attend the same school. Max in 4th, and Lily in Kindergarten.

Lily was so excited for her first day of real 'big kid school' and couldn't wait to ride the bus. Max however, was 'meh'.

Guess who learned to ride a bike today

First try, and off she went. Didn't fall once.

Lily's first ballet recital

Happy Birthday Grandpa!

The kids see the ocean (we've finally arrived)

The view from the condo

Who were we kidding?

I planned the travel on this trip without thinking about the "family/children variables". It's past 10:00 pm and Google keeps adding to our ETA. Right now we are scheduled to reach Orange Beach at just after 1 am.

Screw it. We're getting a room.

Dinosaur World!!

What road trip would be complete without a silly side trip? The kids couldn't wait to visit the "Dinosaur World Giftshop".

For $3 less than than the cost of the cave tour, we were granted access to a walking path surrounded by over 150 life-sized brightly painted dinosaur statues!

We left Dinosaur World at 2:30 and Google says it should take us about 8.5 hours to get to Orange Beach. At 11:00 we'll finally be done driving, yahoo!!

Cave option #2

We were able to find another cave tour that was open. The Diamond Cave was pretty cool, and probably a better 1 hour option than the 2 hour tour we had planned at Mammoth Cave.

Mammoth Cave Tour

The website says to book early, so we booked our 10:30 cave tour 3 or 4 weeks ago. The tour is limited to 118 people.

We spent 30 minutes in the room before we went to bed. This is what we woke up to.

The hotel had a great breakfast, we filled up on waffles and sausages, and left at 9:30 for the park. The front desk recommended we leave early because the park doesn't plow or salt the roads (Kentucky looked to have received about 1/4" of snow overnight).

The parking lot was pretty empty when we got there, but there were still 104 tickets available when we bought ours. They must not have sold many of those.

We parked and I walked over to check it out.

Really?

The First Reinhardt Roadtrip

Camille and a friend rented a condo in Orange Beach, Alabama for the month of February. On Thursday we hopped in the van to visit them for a few days planning on making the 1,000 mile trip over 2 days.

We left Grand Rapids at 4:30 for a hotel near Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. In the morning we will tour the cave, make a few other stops, and be in Alabama by 10 or so. The kids are psyched!