This year, SWEMB BIRT was quite a bit different. I usually travel with my friend, Melanie and her kids, but she had a pretty bad back injury in the spring that just kept getting worse. She made a sad call two weeks ago and said she wouldn't be able to do the trip. She couldn't even walk, let alone sit in a car for hours and hours. I was devastated. I thought about it for a few days, then offered to take her boys with my boys. I mentioned to my college friend, Chelsea Anderson, that I was going to miss my trip and she offered to go!! I am so grateful she accepted the challenge of spending 8 full days with 5 boys ranging age from 15, 13, 12, 10, and 7! We really had a blast. The trip was much different than our other SWEMB BIRT trips; however, it was still incredible.
This year, we planned a trip to the midwest. I have never been to many of the states we traveled and I was looking forward to visiting three more national parks this summer. We flew into Chicago arriving at 8 AM which means we left our house at 4 AM to catch our flight out of Albuquerque. My boys had spent the week prior at FSY and both came home with sore throats. I grabbed some medicine and packed them up on Saturday so we could make our flight on Sunday.
Luckily, when Melanie and I planned this trip, we planned to fly in and out at the exact same time. So we walked over to the gate that the Iverson boys were waiting. Our first big adventure was to get the rental van. The girl at the rental counter ended up charging me extra for a few things I didn't want and I didn't know it until we picked up Chelsea and started driving on the toll roads. I had paid for the toll pass and the girl at the counter didn't give me the toll pass. So Chelsea called budget rental and they said we didn't buy it, BUT I KNEW I DID! Either way, we knew we had to stop and add Chel as a driver so we made plans to stop at the first budget rental car we saw on the road.
Our first stop was downtown Chicago. I booked us a boat architecture tour. We arrived a bit early so we went to a delicious deep dish Chicago style pizza joint then walked over to our boat. The boat tour was an hour and a half. That ended up being a bit too long for the kids. They got sick of seeing the buildings about an hour in to the tour. We finished the tour then walked to Chicago 360. It is a building that has a Tilt. We stood in line for 30 minutes to ride the extremely disappointing tilt. After walking through Chicago, we jumped back in the van and headed to Indiana.
