Another adventure begins and man am I tired.

Before I start, I am going to clarify something, because a few people have asked me a question along these lines - Why would you spend 10 days driving over 2,500 miles with your daughter who is 2 years old. The reasons given for asking such a question are many-

• Won't that be expensive? Yes... but so is everything these days. I have no job
• Why do this, when Ellie won't remember any of it? Because it is 10 days I get to spend with her.
• Aren't you going to miss seeing stuff, because you will spend a lot of time driving? Of course, but I enjoy the scenery as much as the actual locations. For example today I was totally into the hills of West Virginia.

More than anything I guess it all comes down to the fact, that I have this amazing opportunity to spend all of this time with my daughter seeing this great country, and see many of the places in this world that are sacred to me. Yes it is unfortunate that Ellie won't remember much, if any of these trips. However I am hoping that we will become closer and that will count for something down the road. Not to mention I hope that she is able to understand, feel, learn at an early age how important the temple is in her life, or at least how important I think it is. Plus, I don't know that I will ever have this opportunity to spend so much quality time with her. Not to mention it is pretty cool that by her 3rd birthday she will have been to 48 temples, and 31 states. Anyway... on to today...

So today has been one of the longest days of my life. Not long as in terrible, just long as in long. Yesterday at 11:00 PDT, Ellie and I boarded a non-stop flight from LAX to Washington-Dulles. Due to the time we left, that flight is considered a red-eye, and I have experienced first hand what exactly that means. :) However, more on that later.

Our journey started with Kim dropping Ellie and I off at the American Airlines ticketing place. I must have been a site to behold. I was trying to pull two suitcases, carry one duffel bag, push a stroller with a 2-1/2 year old little girl and carry said little girl's suitcase. As if that wasn't enough I also had to wrangle a car seat. Against all odds, I was able to move everything to ticketing, get the 2 large suitcases and car seat checked, before Ellie and I headed off to the gate.

We got to the gate and had an hour to kill. Ellie decided to run around the entire concourse, which was a bit frustrating as I was trying to keep an eye on her while dragging my duffel bag, and push her stroller. You know you are supposed to never let your luggage out of sight these days. Despite the difficulty with which I had in chasing her, I was hopeful that this use of energy would cause her to fall right asleep once we got on the plane. That would turn out to be wishful thinking on my part.

We boarded our flight, which unfortunately was full. Ellie and I had the middle and aisle seat. This caused some stress on my part, wondering what person would be lucky enough to sit next to me and my energetic daughter. That person turned out to be Katharine, Catherine of Katherine. I really have no idea how to spell her name. Anyway she was a nice 20-something from D.C. that had several conversations with Ellie over the course of the flight. There were all good, except the one time that she asked Ellie to stop kicking her.

The flight was four and a half hours, and I think I slept for about an hour of it. This was due to the fact that Ellie only slept for about 90 minutes, and during those 90 minutes she was laying across her seat and mine. I was basically sitting on the edge of my seat while she was sleeping in it. Surprisingly this is not a good position to try and get any rest.

We finally landed, and thankfully we were 30 minutes early. So we got our rental car and started off towards the Washington D.C. temple about an hour earlier than I expected. As evidenced by this picture, Ellie was a bit grumpy by the time we got into the car, but we pushed forward. However a few miles into the trip I noticed the vehicle I had rented did not have cruise control. Since I will be driving thousands of miles during this trip, I decided I needed that luxury. So we turned around and asked for a different car. Thanks to the fact that this Hertz location has the slowest workers ever, that took about 20 minutes longer than I would have liked, and we ended up pulling out of the rental agency around 8:30, which was the time I originally anticipated.

Our first stop was the Washington D.C. temple. I had visited this temple once in 1994 on a very overcast day. So I was excited that the weather today was gorgeous. Ellie who had fallen asleep immediately, during both exits of the rental company, was asleep when we arrived, which surprisingly would be a theme for the day, so I was worried she was going to be a grump, when I woke her up, so we could wander the grounds and get some pictures. Thankfully she wasn't, and we had a good time we walking around. Ellie loved the temple, but was disappointed she couldn't climb on the fountain due to the hedges surrounding it.



After that it we swung by the grocery store for some provisions and muffins for breakfast before taking on the 160 miles or so to Morgantown, West Virginia. It was a beautiful drive and for most of it we were in the state of Maryland, about 10 miles south of Pennsylvania. I love the rolling hills, even if the locals call them mountains. Seriously... landmarks that are under 2,000 feet are clearly not mountains. One of the best parts of the drive... Ellie slept for most of it, which I was hoping would make her less grumpy.



We got to Morgantown, which is the most college town I have ever been in. You can totally tell that Morgantown lives, eats and breathes West Virginia University. The campus itself seemed very small, but the buildings are beautiful. We spent about an hour there wandering around campus, buying a couple souvenirs, eating lunch and enjoying ourselves. That just left us with a 200 mile drive to our final destination of the evening - Columbus, Ohio where we had 3 scheduled stops.



The drive to Columbus was just as pretty as the one to Morgantown. However it was different. The hills aren't as rolling in Ohio as they are in Pennsylvania. What they both share in common is the fact that it is very green, which you don't see so often in SoCal. We were making good time to Columbus, when we were about 10 miles out and all of the sudden traffic stops. Around that same time, my GPS informs me that up ahead a couple miles the freeway is closed due to some accident. That meant we had to turn around, and back track about 5 miles, before driving 15 miles on surface streets. Neither Ellie or I were happy about that. However we eventually made it there, and it only cost us about 30 minutes.

Our first stop was The Ohio State University. We only spent about 15 minutes there. Enough to get Ellie a little stuffed pig. She picked it out, not me and a picture in front of a sign saying "The Ohio State University." This campus is very different from Morgantown. It felt like they were trying to create a very urban atmosphere, but I don't think it worked. The school was nice enough, but the store front surrounding the store are odd in my mind. I can't really describe it, but it was just a bit odd for my unrefined taste.

Next was temple number 28. That would be the Columbus, Ohio temple. I really want Ellie to learn all the temples by sight, but this is going to be a challenge. A lot of the new ones like identical. For example, Snowflake, Monticello, Fresno, Reno and Columbus all have the same plan. The thing that stood out for me with this temple was the grain in the marble, or granite or whatever this temple is constructed out of. It doesn't show well in the pictures, but I thought it was really pretty. We could only stay for a minute, as all of the sudden Ellie tells me in a panic she needs to go potty, There was nowhere for her to go, and so we jumped into the car and headed towards our last stop of the day... Costco!


We went to Costco because I wanted a case of bottled water, gas is cheap there and dinner is cheaper. We bought 2 hot dogs, 2 drinks and a churro... for $5.00. You can't beat that. Then we drove to the hotel, checked in. I gave Ellie a bath, read Green Eggs and Ham for the 374th consecutive time, and now it is bedtime. I put Ellie down around 9:30 local time, which is 6:30 back home. We'll see how that goes.



Anyway... the final statistics for the day were 478 miles of driving, 2 hot dogs, 0 bathroom accidents (We were able to make it to Costco without incident!), 1 churro and about 7-1/2 hours of actual driving. Tomorrow will be about the same. We are going up to Detroit and then back down to Cincinnati, stopping in Toledo and Dayton, before spending the night with some old friends.