I've been busy!

The beginning of July was our family vacation to Bunker Hill Resort. For those of you who don't know, it is a small resort on the Jacks Fork River WAY down in southern Missouri near Mountain View, MO. My grandfather rents us a cabin where all of us stay. We spend a few days relaxing on/near the river. The resort also includes meals in our reservations so we all come running to the sound of the bell. Unfortunately, my little point & shoot camera is seeing it's end and I didn't get many pictures this year :-( The battery barely lasts an hour and the camera can't seem to focus and I didn't realize this until I was there. Last year there was a really bad storm that knocked over trees, etc and made it so we could not reach the cave we visit every year. This year, we figured the trees were cleaned up so we could make it to the cave. We were partially right. We were able to use the road that takes you to the cave trail. However, the trail head was completely overgrown and you couldn't tell where it was anymore. We spent a good 30+min searching for the trail in the humid 100 degree weather before one group of us simply made their own trail and the other half of us found the original. Unfortunately, the cave was closed for safety reasons so we weren't able to explore inside like we usually do. It made for a good hike anyway.



The weekend after I returned from Bunker Hill, Ryan and I went to Chicago with his Young Professionals group. We took a 3.0L turbo-diesel Jeep Grand Cherokee in blackberry pearl, currently only available in the EU. I love that car. It gets 30mpg on the hwy and it's tank is huge so we were able to make it to/from Chicago on one tank of gas (Chrysler gas that we didn't have to pay for :-) ). We stayed about a mile south of the pier (which is just .5miles south of where I was last time) so we had a good location and walked everywhere. Not everyone on the trip was happy about the fact that Ryan and I decided to walk everywhere. Us walking got other people to walk which then made those who didn't want to walk feel like they had to. I don't feel bad though. The people who wanted to take a taxi everywhere were taking the weekend off from training for a half marathon. If you can run 10miles/day you can walk a few miles at a slow pace with the group. It was Ryan's first time in Chicago and we did a lot of exploring. The group paid for 2 dinners. One at a really nice, authentic Italian place and one at the Weber Grill. SO GOOD. The group also paid for an architecture boat tour at night. The boat took us around the river and ended by the pier for the Saturday night fireworks. Unfortunately, some random idiot threw a full, unopened Pepsi can at our boat as we passed under a bridge. It hit a guy in the head and cut him open. The tour had to detour to get him to an ambulance. People are idiots.

The next weekend, I returned to KC so our family could leave for Belize :-)