road trippin

Well, we survived four days in a car and hotel room with the four of each other.
Can I just say it was a loooong four days.

Here are just a few quick highlights...

After we made half the trip on Wednesday, we drove from Indy to St Louis Thursday morning, and spent the afternoon with our realtor getting a feel for the areas and things like that. (We're checking out the western suburbs of St Louis... the Lake St. Louis/ St. Peters/ O'Fallon/ Chesterfield areas. Pfizer is located in Creve Coeur and in Chesterfield.)


Thursday evening the Laughlins drove in from Columbia and the Malones drove in from the city (our hotel was actually in Chesterfield) to have dinner with us. It was so great to see everyone and get to hang out for a bit. We ate at Red Robin and just chatted and had a great time for as long as we could before we needed to get the kids back to get to bed. They all followed us back to the hotel and after the kids said goodnight, Ryan got to hang out with the gang for a bit longer downstairs in the lounge.


Friday was stormy and pouring down rain (and I mean pouring torrential rain). Great weather for driving around and looking at houses, let me tell you. We were completely soaked from between the car and the front door of a house every time. Just basically another full day of driving around the area with the realtor and trying to get a feel for the area. We wound things up mid-afternoon and spent some time hanging out at the hotel pool and hot tub.


Sawyer's absolute favorite part of the trip was anytime we were in an elevator! He thought it was such fun. He ran all the way down the hall every time we left our room, pressed the button, and just stood there giggling waiting to get on. When we would go down, Ryan would tell him to jump, and he would just crack up. He made the funniest faces and went "woooo!" every time. We may never need to take this kid to an amusement park... just the elevator will do just fine! Here are a couple shots in the elevator on our way to down to the pool.

We of course wanted to take full advantage of our meals being on someone else's dime, so we wanted a nice dinner out. I felt bad however, making the kids sit through yet another long dinner in a restaurant (not to mention the majority of the past three days strapped in a car), so we walked around the mall down the road and fed them from the food court there. (This mall had an awesome two-story carousel. As luck would have it, I actually contemplated taking my camera to the mall with us, but then I thought why? we're just getting some exercise and getting the kids some dinner. So I didn't. And then we find this gorgeous carousel there... I was so bummed!) So the kids took a couple of rides, had some dinner and we headed back to the hotel for a much needed early kiddo bedtime. After the kids were finally asleep, we ordered our dinner to-go from the nearby Cheesecake Factory. Ryan went to pick it up and when he brought it back, we ended up eating it in the little entryway to our room, on the floor, right between our front door and the door to the bathroom with the bathroom light on and the door cracked open so we could see, but not bother the kids sleeping over in the beds. Nice fancy dinner. Out of take-out boxes on our hotel room floor! Oh, the sacrifices parents make...

We hit the road Saturday morning... a full day of driving with the kids. Poor things. I felt bad for them. They were so sick of being stuck in the car and probably quite sick of each other by that point. I feel like we were all within a five foot or less radius of each other for those four days... between the car and the hotel room.

Ah.... peace and quiet at last... at only an hour left till we arrived home!