Day 1

Our first day was a pretty standard travel day: wake up at 3am, eat a quick breakfast, and head to the airport (by the way, why are there so many cars on the road at 4 in the morning?!). Everything with security and checking in went pretty quickly and Steve & I got on our plane to Denver. In Denver we had an hour layover, during which we ate from the copious amounts of snackies we brought with us (home-made beef jerky, sticky rice, apple slices, fudge, and cookie crumbles (they were cookies, but they got a bit smashed in Steve’s backpack). In the Denver airport I was a little worried that the men’s bathroom doubled as a tornado shelter….do those happen a lot in Denver? It’s like in Oregon when you see all the tsunami escape route signs on the side of the road; one would think I would have heard about tsunamis frequenting the state just below mine.

Anyways, we got to Omaha and I was amazed at how small that airport is. I was trying to find our flight on the reader board so I could figure out which carousel our luggage would be coming out on until we looked to see that there are only like 3 carousels and only one had luggage on it and, big surprise, all the people from our plane were gathering around it. So we got our luggage and found our cousin Sarah and her super cute new daughter Maddison and we were off….well, sort of. Steve brought his mandolin and broke a string re-tuning it when we got off the plane so we had to stop by a music store to get new strings for him. After another quick stop at Target, we headed to Missouri Valley and Sarah showed us the nursing home where our grandparents now live and showed us how to get there from her house (she and Maddison couldn’t come in because our grandpa has been fighting a cold). So Steve and I headed over to visit our grandparents. It’s really weird to see them just sitting in a room all day, they used to always be go, go, go. But I guess that’s what happens when you get old. After hanging out with them for a couple hours we headed to my aunt’s house in Logan where we’ll be staying for the week and Steve and I promptly fell asleep after eating dinner. Hahaha! Ok, not really, but I fell asleep for an hour or so and finally went to bed around 11 and Steve went to bed around 7:30 (for those of you keeping track, that’s 5:30PST), so we were pretty tired.

All in all, it was a great day. We got to see all of our family here and since we traveled at such a weird time we’re pretty much used to the time change now. Tonight my sister-in-law, Jenna, and my nephew, Jaxon, fly in and they’ll be around for the rest of the time Steve and I are here too. There’s been talk of going to the Omaha Zoo, which is apparently the nation’s best zoo (for those of you who don’t know, I love the zoo!!), and we plan to get dinner one of these nights with our old family friend, Lyle (he sponsored my dad to come to the United States….so basically, without him I wouldn’t be here writing this blog). It should be a really fun week!