2024 Texas Trip Part I- Kansas

A long long time ago (seven years ago), at the time of the last North American solar eclipse, Leland and I charted the path of totality for the next solar eclipse, and decided we would make the trip to Texas for it in 2024. We knew Esther would be 10 by then and the thought seemed crazy! We wondered where we would be living, we wondered how many kids we would have and we mentioned the idea that it would be fun to do the trip in an RV so that we wouldn't have to worry about hotels. So in many ways this trip was the fulfillment of a lot of years of dreaming and it really felt strange to see myself  living the life and doing the trip that my past self only dreamt of! Esther, 10 years old, 6 (9?) kids (!) and in an RV to boot. 

This trip was really fun and made me really happy. But it wasn't without its challenges. As per my last post, in February we were placed with a sibling group of three. I quickly determined that it would be in everyone's best interest if the kids went to respite care and didn't join us on the trip as sad and as guilty as that decision made me, it was the right decision. But in addition to packing and planning the trip for us, I had to pack up the kids separately, have several phone conversations with their respite family to give instructions, and have the additional worry about the kids and how they were doing the entire time we were away. (They were fine and they had lots of fun with their respite family!) 

We were able to borrow my mom's RV for the trip. RVing was quite the new adventure for us! My mom  brought it over the day before we left and we got to packing it right away. It was strange and convenient to pack everything into the drawers and cupboards and compartments of the RV instead of stuffing every crack and crevice of our van like we usually do for road trips. 

The RV had 8 beds (that we used). The girls slept in the loft, the boys slept in the bunk bed, Sorrel and I slept in the queen bed, and Leland and Moses slept on the couch fold out bed. The RV also had 9 seatbelts, and we brought carseats along for the little ones. 

The day before the trip we also made our eclipse shirts (shamelessly copied from one of my favorite blogs). 

The kids were so excited for the trip and that's one thing that I just love about traveling with kids, their utter excitement over every little thing. 

This little table the kids sat around was really nice for them to color and eat and play with things on while we were driving. 

The kids all did really well with the driving except for poor little Sorrel. She was a car screamer since the day she was born. That was part of the reason we broke the driving up into days and days, but it was still a LOT of driving for a little girl. 

The first day was quite boring as we just drove from our house in Utah to Aurora Colorado, about 9 hours. We camped at a cheap state park there and had our first night in the rv. It was really great to just park, hook up the electricity, slide out the sides and put everyone into bed. 

The temperature fluctuations as we drove across the country were fun (and challenging to pack for). Colorado was our coldest night, but since we did this trip in April the temperatures were still relatively mild. ( I was so glad we weren't in Texas in July like previous trips!)

Poor sleeping Sorrel who we had to wake up the next morning before we started driving again. 

The next day we drove across Kansas. I was prepared for Kansas to be wildly boring, and as far as landscapes went it was, but there were so many little tourist traps to stop for! Every other stop had the world's largest this or that. We only stopped at one though, the world's largest Czech egg. 

I don't even remember the name of this little town but it was settled by Czech immigrants and thus the largest Czech egg. I was taking a picture of the kids by it when some nice man pulled over and offered to take our picture. 

Up until now Leland had drove most the time. That's usually what works best for us, him to drive and me to take care of the kids. But after a while I just needed a little break from tending to the kids. Since I was riding sideways in the RV I was a little more prone to getting car sick too. So I took some turns driving and it was scary but not as bad as I had thought (at this point anyways).  While I was driving through Kansas I kept seeing signs for Little Sweden. I love anything Swedish so I convinced Leland that we should take a little detour and check it out. 

The town is called Lindborg and was darling.  

Everything in the town closed at 5 and we got there at literally 5:02 so that was a big disappointment. We didn't get to go into any of the stores, but it was probably for the best as  I could have spent loads of money in this darling store. We did walk around and had fun looking at all the dala horses, and the houses and the storefronts. One lady told us about a park down the street so we drove down there and let the kids play a while while I made dinner in the RV. 

It was really a cute cute place. For months afterward, Moses would tell us he wanted to go back to Little Sweden for his birthday. I wish! 

A few more hours of driving and we were finally, finally to our next camp ground.  This was one of our latest nights of driving and the kids were asleep all over the RV by the time we pulled in. We went to another state park called Card Creek, near Independence, Kansas. 

A word about RV tripping, always ALWAYS, go for the state parks over private RV parks. The times we had to stay in RV parks it was triple the price, with RVs 5 feet away from us on either side, bright street lights blaring into our windows, and no amenities to make all of that worth the price. The state parks had the same hookups and hardly any people, plus beautiful views of nature. 

This morning bedhead was the beginning of Moses' humidity induced hair transformation. 

Card Creek Campground. It was so beautiful. I woke up at sunrise to so many birds singing songs I've never heard in Utah. I took Moses and Julian, the early risers, out to see the river (it was called a creek but coming from Utah, this couldn't possibly be a creek right?!), while the rest of the family stayed asleep. 

Our RV looking tiny among the huge trees. 

First thing after breakfast we headed to Parsons, Kansas. This part of the trip has an interesting story. After our last trip to Texas, I told Leland that next time we went to Texas, I wanted to make more of a trip of it and stop at more fun places. I suggested maybe stopping at the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Kansas. Kansas is above Texas and Oklahoma so surely it isn't that far out of the way? It was in fact pretty far out of the way, but the girls and I love LHOTP so we made plans to go through Kansas. Well sometime before the trip, Leland was mentioning to his mom that we were going to be going through Kansas. She said that she had some ancestors buried in a cemetery in Kansas, that she had been trying to find out more about, and if it was close by could we consider going to look for them. It turned out this cemetery in Parsons, Kansas was only about 45 minutes away from the Little House on the Prairie Museum, so we told her we would be happy to go and look for them .

We started searching around the cemetery and realized it was gigantic and we would be there all day trying to find them. There was a tiny run down building labelled "office" that for sure looked like it was closed. But it wasn’t and there was a nice man inside who was the manager of the cemetery. He looked up the plots of the ancestors and we went searching for them. It was a beautiful spring day and a beautiful historic cemetery. I didn’t mind the hours we spend searching. After a while the man sent us to the town hall to see if they had more records, and we found out that the ancestors were buried in “potters field” where poor people were buried because it was the worst spot in the cemetery due to the river flooding on it. The graves didn’t have any markers anymore which was quite disappointing, but the nice man helped us find the exact spot where they were. 

After all this time searching I was quite invested in these ancestors, even though they were Leland’s great great great grandparents, not mine. 

They were Augusta and Catherine Petithory and their two sons, Eddie who died when he was four and an infant son who was also presumed to be buried here. Jane was hoping to find more information on these two sons, who died in 1888, so that she could have them sealed to their parents. The information we found at the city hall was enough, and Leland and I were able to do the sealing in the temple a few months after this trip. 

I have always loved history but I felt a bond and a connection to these people, thinking about Catherine burying her two sons in this exact place almost 150 years ago. It made me think that maybe I could get into family history if it involved more searching through old cemeteries and less fruitless searches on the internet. 

I was enthralled by being at the cemetery (it was so green! Everytime I leave Utah I’m so surprised at how GREEN and alive other places are) but the kids were so fed up after searching the cemetery for hours and hours, so we quickly piled in the RV and drove to the place that was the whole reason we came to Kansas. 

The Little House on the Prairie Museum!

When I was a little girl I had an obsession with all things pioneer and Little House. I read the books over and over and I made sure  I was always home every weekday at 6pm to watch the tv show on PBS. To say I've passed my obsession on to my girls is a bit of an understatement. They talk about Laura like she's an old friend around here, because she is!

Needless to say we were all so excited to see where their homestead was in Kansas and see the museum that is there now. As it got closer I started to get nervous that maybe it wouldn't be that exciting or that the kids would be let down.

But as soon as we pulled up  I knew it would be good. It was so far out in the middle of farmland, but it had a pretty white farmhouse on it and a few other buildings. 

We got out and went into the main house. We paid a few dollars each for admission and loved exploring Little House paraphernalia of every sort inside the gift shop. (I should have taken more pictures but having 6 kids in a gift shop doesn't lend itself well to picture taking.) I wanted to buy everything but we ended up getting some quilt blocks to make a little house quilt together. 

Nothing on the land is anything the Wilder family actually used, it's all just time period artifacts that are brought from other places, except for the well Pa dug which still stands today. 

The girls in front of the well. 

Even though it's a small thing, that was the neatest to see! As I was there, and maybe because we had just been at the cemetery, I was thinking about ancestors and posterity. Because Laura's daughter Rose never had children, the Ingalls family line died out and there are no direct descendants of Laura alive today. (Much to Adele's dismay, she has asked me many times if we are related to Laura.) But as I think about adoption and how we adopted Julian into our family, I think it goes the same way with ancestors. The Wilders are our adopted ancestors now simply because we know so much about them, we've come to love them and their stories. I know we're not alone in that love, so I think Laura must have hoards of adopted posterity here on earth. ;) 

There was a very cute donkey there too that all the kids just loved and he loved them!

After this we were in for another long day and night of driving, on to Texas...