Cory and Sadie

I woke up this morning with a nervous pit in my stomach. I was so nervous. We were crossing the Canadian border into unknown land. What were we going to do? Where were we going to stay? I kept telling myself it was no big deal. We've done this before and we can do it again. With kids. We started driving north on this freeway in the country. We were literally the only people around with rolling farmers fields and mountains rising up in the background. We stopped at a fruit stand and bought freshly picked raspberries and Montana cherries the first of the season she said. They were so good. I think we each ate about two cups of raspberries a piece. Great antioxidants, eh? After that we saw a farm that sold cage free chicken eggs. We stopped and bought a dozen for only $2 and they didn't need to be refrigerated. Bonus!! Cory had gone to Utah Natural Meats and bought some sausage, bacon and pork chops for our trip and the eggs meant that we would definitely be

It was a little chilly this morning until the sun came over the mountains then we were sticky and hot within minutes. We had a hard time trying to figure out how to piece all of our stuff back together into the car. Cory made breakfast while I broke down camp. The kids ran around covered in mosquito bites. There were so many mosquitoes. Zelly got the worst of it. She got bit right by her eye and it's swollen up. She looks like she got in a fight at the saloon in Bannack. The poor gal. Isaak is itching his until they bleed. I finally put lavender and tea tree oil on them all and that helped. We bought this bug-spray without Deet since Zella is still too young to use Deet, but I don't think it was that effective obviously since we have about 20 bites a pieces. Hungry little mosquitoes. After two hours of arranging and rearranging we got everything and everyone back in the car, but we made a quick stop at the Ghost town to hike up to the cemetery and see a few more of the houses.

Packing, unpacking, cleaning, organizing, planning, re-planning, forest fires, ferry tickets, laundry-sooo much laundry, worrying, angst, stressing, food planning, bag picking, snack buying, roof racks, chickens, dogs, kids, and alas we are off. Nothing felt better then when we locked all the doors asking over and over if we'd forgotten anything and took off towards the open road. Only to turn back to rearrange the cooler because we almost smashed Isaak when we made our first turn. It felt like a relief for it to finally be happening. I was excited to spend the next month with four of my most favorite people on an adventure. We have one of our biggest drives ahead of us today and it was only a mere 5.5 hour drive to Bannack, Montana. The ride was hot, but we had air conditioning which helped. Cory talked about when he was a kid they'd make their yearly journey to Edmonton sweating, sticky and uncomfortable. He dreamed of swimming pools and lakes at his final destination. We l