Day 1: Are We There Yet?

I was up until 2 am Wednesday night getting everything ready to go. I was told to be at my mom's house at 7:30 am, so I got up and 6:30, finished packing the car, got Starsky ready to go to Jesse's parents house, woke up the kids, loaded them in the car, and we were ready to go. As I was pulling out of the driveway I decided that I should call my mom and ask if I was supposed to feed my kids breakfast or if we were eating together. Well apparently I was told wrong, and we were all meeting at 8:30. So I ran back in the house to make sure we didn't forget anything, then we stopped at McDonalds and arrived at my mom's house 45 minutes early. We helped my mom finish gathering everything, loaded the truck, waited for everyone else to arrive and loaded all their stuff. We headed out around 10, in a caravan of 3 cars. As we were pulling out I realized that I didn't have my cell phone with me. I guess when I went in to see if I had left anything I sat my phone down and left it. Stupid! I won the car arranging lottery, and was assigned to drive the truck with my sister, her 12 year old son, and Lincoln. We had 2 empty seats and no whiners! The drive went great for the most part. We stopped in Nephi for lunch. When we got to Scipio we realized that no one in our car had directions and that my other sister had gotten too far in front of us, and my mom was no longer behind us. So we stopped and tried to call them. No one was answering. We finally got ahold of my sister and got directions, but we couldn't find my mom. We were starting to get worried since she had a bunch of little kids with her, but since she wasn't answering we just kept going. Mapquest told us the drive would be 5 hours, but it ended up taking us 7. My mom had missed the exit, but she still beat us by an hour. When we got to the cabin we unloaded the truck, then headed to the Petrified Forrest for an easy (2 mile) hike. It was gorgeous. Tanner, my 11 month old nephew, screamed until his mom finally stopped about half a mile in, and he kept screaming the rest of the time. We saw a beautiful sunset, but it got really dark before we finished. After that we just hung out at the cabin the rest of the night, and stayed up way too late. My sister, Chalee, her husband, Jared, and my dad arrived about 2 am the next morning.