Benjamin activated one of his Christmas travel bugs today, Scorpy the Homesick Scorpion. We still have to find a good starting cache for it.

The trek across the country took four days. With four boys, you gotta have lots of stuff in the car. We were packed to the gills–sleeping bags, pillows, blankets, food, water, cd players for each kid, a TV, movies, video games, reading books, activity books…well, lots of stuff to keep busy.

We traveled across eight states before we got to North Carolina–Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In Texas we stopped at The Million Barrel Museum. We saw it off the freeway and decided it might be interesting. It was a big hole where they use to keep a million barrels of oil. We also saw a lot of old unused oil rigs. I guess that’s Texas.

We saw the mighty Mississippi river and some battlefields in the area. The kids found a fun hill and spent an hour sliding down it. Some things are just more interesting than our county’s longest river or history. Here are Ben and Gordon enjoying the great state of Mississippi.

It turned out we ended up in Georgia on Halloween. I have a cousin (also my roommate in college) North of Atlanta, so we stayed with her family. They were so hospitable and we had lots of fun. We carved jack-o-lanterns, trick-or-treated, saw their friend’s house who goes all out for Halloween, had pizza, wrestled, stayed up late, and had a great visit. Nick, Ben, Gordon & Ethan were all super heros–Nick was actually the super villian. Ethan wouldn’t pose for the picture.

So we decided to move again. Tucson was great. We saw everything (almost), and we were blessed to see the desert and it’s wonders (beautiful sunsets, the Grand Canyon, the mountains of Tucson), but we really missed things like seasons and trees–cactus just didn’t cut it anymore. We had the opportunity to go somewhere new, so we took it. Sold our house in a week and packed up and moved out a few weeks later. The kids made forts out of all the boxes. This was the most difficult move due to all the stuff we had. I was glad to de-junk and give away stuff we really didn’t need. We really appreciate the few elect people who helped us. Rob always helps people move in and out of the wards of wherever we are because he knows it takes a real sacrifice. Thank you.

Right before we left, Benjamin had his first piano recital. Here is a picture of him (2nd from the left), his teacher, Jana, and the others she teaches. We were blessed to have such a great teacher who came to the house for lessons and gave so much of her time.

One day in October the kids had a vacation day, so I decided to take them to Apple Annies. It’s a orchard in Willcox, Arizona. Of course we picked apples–granny smith for Nick, golden delicious for Ben, and red delicious for Gordon. We had a apple treats in the store, then headed over to the vegetable patches.

We picked everything to sample at home—eggplants
I fried them up with a nice batter, but nobody liked them (me neither).

—Hot green chilies. Nick wanted them, but we didn’t know how to eat them after we got them home. We also picked our pumpkins. Even though we didn’t eat much of what we picked, we did take home some very hot salsa (we like it hot), melons and yummy apple butter. It was fun just doing the picking.