Crazy 5!: Summer life in Savannah (part 2)

In August, Thayne took a few weeks off to explore the east coast with us.

Tightening Lexi's helmet for her horse ride.

Tay was a happy little girl. This was the only horse ride they got to have this summer.

I was seriously in love with this deer. She was a wild deer, but she liked it there so much she just hung around. Her name was Callie and she was just like a dog; she followed you around and ate out of your hand. I wanted to bring her home!

We took the kids to see the dinosaurs since the girls have developed an OBSESSION with dinosaurs. Jaxon was a little freaked out at first.

We checked out Jekyll Island. There we found a Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Center. We learned a lot about Sea Turtles.

These are little baby sea turtles.

Dad buried them in the sand at Tybee Island.

We decided to spend a weekend in Jacksonville, Florida.

Little train ride they had in the Jacksonville mall.

GORGEOUS view we had of the river from our room.

We visited the Jacksonville zoo and rode the merry-go-round until we were dizzy.

One of the coolest places: Oatland Island Wildlife Center! It's a wildlife conservation center for all the animals native to that area.

We had serious ant problems toward the end of our stay in Savannah. I couldn't believe how easy it was to develop an ant problem. We left the lid to this syrup open and put it in the cupboard. Before we knew it, ants were streaming in and swarming the bottle.

They were proud of this wall :) We almost made it through the alphabet. We should have easily done a letter a day but I kept forgetting.

What am I going to do about this boy? Anytime he sees a little girl, he is all over her.

This was an alligator just off the highway at the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.

One week before we are supposed to come home for the summer, we have to move into an entirely different apartment complex (Trellis). That was not fun; moving 2 times in less than 10 days. In this pic, we are laying around feeling sick (colds) and exhausted from all the moving.

Here begins the journey home. Sunday, September 2, we left later than anticipated. I got pulled over in Atlanta because our trailer does not have a license plate on it. You don't need one in Utah if the trailer weighs less than 1,000 lbs. Unfortunately, that is not the case in Georgia. Luckily, he let me off. There was a hurricane moving in, so it was windy and pouring sheets of rain. To top it off, I was determined to bring home an official Georgia peach. That meant stopping at I think around 8 different stores in the pouring rain before finding a place that had Georgia peaches. We finally made it to Nashville and spent our first night in a hotel. Before we left Nashville the next morning, we checked the tires on the trailer to find that they looked like this. It was pretty poor timing. It was Labor Day and NO TIRE STORES were open EXCEPT for Wal-Mart. Oh, and let's not forget the rain and wind. Yeah. Anyways, we soon learned that Wal-Mart will not touch trailers if there are personal items on them. We talked it over and agreed that Thayne would buy a tire jack, take each tire off, hand them to one of the guys who would pop the tire off and pop on a new one, hand it back and Thayne would put them back on. Things were looking up...until they told us we had to put our names on the waiting list. We had to find a way to burn 3 hours. Well, we'll just say we finally hit the road, wet and irritable, and in for a long, long all-nighter.

The kids slept really well through the night drive. Thayne was a champ and drove most of the night.

After that long all-nighter, we stopped to let the kids stretch their legs at a Cabella's somewhere in Nebraska.

We only stopped 3 times to sleep on the way home: Nashville, Cheyenne, and Heidie's (Evanston). So glad we made the stop to let the kids ride horses and explore Heidie and Rollie's little country home.