June22

“Dad makes better sandwiches, but you give me more chips,” says Ryan. I guess we all have our strengths and weaknesses. One of mine isn’t driving – at least when it comes to RV’s. I hate driving the beast. Rick had been hinting the last couple days that it was my turn, I put him off for a while but promised him today I would drive. So I drove, all day. And I hated it, all day. About 1 of the 7 hours was on freeway the other 6 were on tiny little backroads with lots of pot holes, narrow shoulders, curves and hills. It also poured most of the day. My knucles were white from griping the wheel, my face hurts from clenching my teeth and my eyes stung from holding back the tears. Which didn’t always stay held back. I was stressed and overwhelmed and terrified most of those 7 hours. But I was successful. No one died, I didn’t fall off the road I didn’t harm any person or property. On the other hand Rick is a good driver (except for that little incident in New Orleans, where he ripped the mirror off someone car and dented in the door) but today he played stewardess. His job was to tell me where to go, feed the kids, set up their games/movies, read scriptures with them, keep the rv clean. He did a pretty good job except for the cleaning up part. The Rv was an absolute disaster when we arrived. Like Junie B Jones says I don’t want to toot my own horn but I think I am better at playing stewardess than Rick. I guess that’s what makes us such a good team. Together we can do anything – even make a pretty decent lunch.

We started out the day by going to the Joseph Smith Birthplace in Sharon Vermont. We debated wether or not we should go because it was a couple hours out of our way. But we decided to go, and I am so glad we did. It was really pretty neat. Vermont is beautiful. I am not sure why the Smiths wanted to leave, it looked like a wonderful place to live. I really enjoyed the scenery and the visitors center. The missionary asked us if we wanted to watch a movie, again we debated. I knew we had Joseph Smith movies in the rv and I thought we should just watch it on our way and hurry it along but we decided to watch it. We were the only ones there so we went into the theater and all got cosy. The movie is a new movie (about 6 weeks old) called Joseph Prophet of the Restoration. It is a lot like the last movie with the same name – in fact they kind of just reworked that movie. I really liked it and the kids all did to. I was impressed by how the focus and watched it. It was a nice morning.

Being in Vermont we thought we should buy some syrup so we went in search for some real maple syrup. We found a working maple farm and cheese factory called Sugarbush Farm to visit. It took a little while to get there and if I would have know what the roads would have been like I would have never stopped but it was really cool. We learned how to make cheese and syrup. We tasted lots of different kinds and syrup, cheese, jams and other sauces. They were really good and we bought a few. The kids were in love with the syrup and have been begging for pancakes all day.

We had decided to stay in a State Park about 1 hour south of Palmyra. The problem was our GPS lead us all over these tiny hilly backroads through absolutely beautiful thickly wooded forests to a locked gate. It was almost 10 at that point and we figured there was no way to find another park that night so we were stressing a little bit but decided to just get back on the road and keep driving. Well the locked gate kind of was a breaking point for me and the driving. I just decided I couldn’t possibly back that huge thing back out onto a road so I got Rick to do it, he took the wheel for the rest of the night. Luckily that didn’t end up being to long. As we went to get back on the freeway I spotted a sign for the park we had just been to. The sign pointed the other way. We decided to try it out. Turns out the park entrance was on the other side, the gate we got to was the back gate. We got in the park and found an open site. The The site we came to first was grass, we wanted a gravel or concrete site so we started to circle looking for one. But then decided it was late enough we would just take the grass site. Turns out that was pretty smart. There was only grass and dirt sites and since it poured all night the next morning all the dirt sites were mud bogs where the grass sites were pretty soggy but nothing like the dirt sites. We got out ok which may not have been the case if we would have gone with a dirt site. The campground was really beautiful, we got in so late and left pretty much as soon as we all got up and showered that we didn’t see much of it but what we did see was amazing.