Me, a minivan, and five boys!

This past week we went on a well deserved/earned family vacation. We traveled to Four Corners, Durango, Mesa Verde, and Arches National Park.

Me, a minivan, and 5 boys! CRAZY! But it was a BLAST!

Prep work...
Money is tight..there is NO doubt that money is super tight for us. We have been saving for a while to be able to go on a small vacation without going into debt. This included new tires for the van at the last minute as well. To save money we decided to not eat out very much. I think this saved us the most amount of money. So I packed the cooler full of sandwich meat, cheese and other fixings that I had bought on sale recently. I also packed apples, string cheese, crackers, chips, granola bars etc. that I also had bought in the past 6 weeks- on sale as well. Then from the freezer I packed some frozen ribs and frozen, cooked ground beef. I used these for meals in my slow cooker. I also made sure that we stayed in a place that had a decent continental breakfast. In the end, we only ate out twice with a grand total of about $60.

Day one:
Everything was SET! We packed up the van on Sunday evening except for what needed to go into the cooler. We had tires put on the van on Friday and filled the tank on Saturday. I thought for sure the kids were going to be waking us up at 3am Monday morning, but they slept until 5:15. Cory and I were up at 5 and we were out the door by 6. The boys made muffins the night before and we ate those happily until we reached Page at about 8am. There we stopped and looked at Glen Canyon and Lake Powell. It was fun to show the boys the boats that we rode in last year for our anniversary.
After Page, we set off for Four Corners We traveled through the Navajo Nation. For me this was a very sad awakening for me. So many of the houses did not have electricity and it was very common to see outhouses. We are so blessed to live where we do. The drive through the Monument Valley was BEAUTIFUL. Another time I want to drive through the park instead of just around it. But what we saw was just breathtaking. There was a lot of “Oh look over there! And over there!!” Cory took a geology class a couple years ago and he was able to re-educate me with how the different formed mountains. It was all very interesting.We arrived at Four Corners National Monument at about 1pm. Talk about a monument in the middle of nowhere..lol..there literally isn’t anything around for miles. James ran over to the monument and immediately laid in the middle like he had practiced daily for the last few weeks. We take his picture and he exclaims “I’ve been waiting so long to do that!”We take some more pictures, meet people from and then we have some sandwiches. We mosey around the shops were I find some turtle earrings that I LOVED (and I hope I’m getting them for mother’s day….).


We take off again and we start passing through states. STOP! And we hop out of the car and over to take pictures of the state signs.


























Lots of getting out of the car produces some funky hair!


We stayed at the Iron Horse Inn. It was…decent. The first room that we were in had a few…well..quirks. It was a two story room. There was 3 queen beds and a fold out couch. You could fit a lot of people there for sure! (Not to bad for $100 a night) Plus a fridge, microwave and two bathrooms. –(I wish I would have taken a picture of the bathroom floor..lol..cause it was the SAME linoleum that my Grandma Brown had in her kitchen when I was younger…brown squares..lol..I use to stare at it determined to find the pattern in it..loll.. )The room looked like it was built in the 50’s. Yellow linoleum counters ect..you know the type. It wasn’t bad at all and I would have been happy to stay there. Well, the shower was leaking…into the floor below…so we requested a different room. Not only did they put us into a new room but they upgraded us to a family suite. It had a kitchenette in it and had been recently remodeled. (It looked like they were remodeling a lot of different areas). It was a perfect room for us. It had two queen beds and a rollaway. Plus a jetted tub. Oh so nice! The view was BEAUTIFUL also. Although they didn’t charge us extra for upgrading us, I would have paid the difference if needed.The rest of the evening we chilled. We took the boys to the pool to swim and we had Wendy’s for dinner while the boys ooggled over all of the tv stations.
Stay tuned for day 2!!