We are here!

Home sweet home in Washington!  We drove across the country, traveling through fourteen States, and arrived in Sammamish, WA yesterday at noon, leaving a trail of personal belongings at every hotel we stopped at along the way. 
Our first day started out bad.  Two hours behind schedule thanks to the slow and delayed closing on our house, and then lots of traffic and construction which turned our 8-hour drive into a 12-hour drive.  We stopped at Niagara Falls which was cool, but crowded.  The boys hit the jackpot in the parking lot as they searched for a license plate from every State.  We successfully found all 50 plates by the time we got to Montana.  North Dakota and Delaware were the last ones we found.
We stopped in Erie, PA and scored a sweet hotel with a huge indoor water park we enjoyed for a few hours, and then it was on to Rockford, IL just outside of Chicago.  We drove up through part of Wisconsin and then into Minnesota where we stayed with the Beus family, our good friends from our Boston days.  We took a whole day off from driving and enjoyed boating and hanging out while the 7 boys played and played and played.  It was so much fun and was the perfect break before hitting the road hard for the next two days.
We left Minnesota early in the morning in such a heavy rainstorm some of the roads were flooded over so it was slow going.  We stopped at Mt. Rushmore where the boys climbed around on every boulder imaginable.  Mt Rushmore is pretty awe-inspiring for being something man-made.  I'm glad we went but now that I've seen it I have no plans of ever going back!
We drove to our hotel in Wyoming and an hour from our destination pulled over at a gas station with a completely flat tire.  Naturally we had to unload the entire back of the van to get to the spare tire which woke up sleeping Parker and he cried through the whole thing.  We slowly drove the final hour to our hotel and Randy got up early the next morning and got a new tire (I had just replaced all 4 tires on the van before the drive.  Grrrrrr!) We started each morning with a prayer for safety and protection and are so relieved the only mishap was a flat tire.  It could've been so much worse!
The next day was long as we drove through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and into Eastern Washington.  Each day our incentive was to get through the drive so the boys could swim in the hotel pool.  By the end of each day they were like caged animals with so much pent up energy we're lucky we never got kicked out of the hotel.  Randy drove almost the entire time.  He decided listening to his audiobooks with his earbuds cranked loud enough to drown out the noise from the back was a better alternative than sitting in the back with the boys.  Lucky me.  I watched more lame movies, built more Lego creations, searched for lost Legos, and picked up the same mess over and over again that the whole thing is kind of a blur.
But it was fun.  Long but fun.  And hopefully a memory that will last a lifetime. 
We closed on our house here so tonight is the last night in a hotel (Hooray!) and the truck is bringing our stuff tomorrow.  Randy starts work on Monday so we are hitting the ground running.