Our Thanksgiving Road Trip

For Thanksgiving, we decided we wanted to head to Maryland to see my brother and sister and their families.  We don't get to see them very often so we were all pretty excited.  We got packed up, loaded the suburban and then this happened.

Yep, dead battery.  Luckily it didn't delay us too long.  And we were on the road.  The first day we just drove.

But on Thanksgiving morning, we woke up and drove into Shenandoah National Park.  We quickly realized this might have been the best day out of the year to check it out because everyone else was home eating turkey!  There was hardly anyone there.  The few we did run across were either foreign exchange students, or people happily hiking the Appalachian Trail.  There is a long skyline drive you can take to see a lot of the park and it was beautiful!

We were able to eat our Thanksgiving dinner (bread, cheese, chips, cookies and water) right on the Appalachian Trail.

After we left the park we took a spur-of-the moment trip into Washington DC.  The kids had never been so they were excited!  Because it was Thanksgiving, it really wasn't too crowded and we were able to park right near the mall.  We just checked out a few main sites - the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the White House.  But when you only have about two hours, that's what you see!

Also, on a side note - we had no idea how many thousands of squirrels call the national mall home.  But Max tried to chase every single one of them!

Friday we were able to head over to Annapolis to see family.  The kids needed cousin time!

And then we left for home around 4:15pm.  We didn't get home until 1:45 am.  And let me be very honest - that last 30 minutes was a killer to stay awake!  I was so glad to pull into our driveway so we could quickly crawl into bed!

We were able to recover on Saturday and then Sunday our small group went to check out the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky.  It was really impressive answering tons of questions I didn't even know to think of!

It was a busy few days, but we really packed a lot into it!  We are so blessed to be able to hop in the car and head anywhere we want!