Summer Vacation Part 1

Summer Vacation Part 1

 On June 8^th, we started out on our 19-day journey of the heartland to visit friends and family. Our first destination was West Lafayette, Indiana, to visit our friends Matt and Sarah Bethune. Matt and Sarah are Madelyn’s Godparents, and we hadn’t seen them in over a year, so it was nice to catch up. The highlight of our trip was our visit to an IU Hospital sponsored Community Health Fair in a high school gym. Matt was performing in a puppet show about bullying. Aside from enjoying the excellent puppet show, we got to walk through a giant inflatable heart (where we learned about aneurysms), watch an up-close demonstration of the “Leonardo DaVinci Surgery Robot” peel the skin off of a grape, and see a life-flight helicopter land in the parking lot. For Mady, none of this was nearly as exciting as meeting Sparky the fire dog (man in a big suit). She told us that she loves Sparky and has dreams about him. ~sigh~

The next leg of our journey was to Topeka, Kansas, to spend some time with Carrie’s parents. We hadn’t seen them since October, so we planned to spend the bulk of our trip with them. Shortly after arriving in Kansas, I got on a plane and flew out to Georgia for the National Housing Training Institute at the University of George for a week. We planned our vacation to overlap with this trip because it gave Carrie and the girls an extra week in Topeka that did not count against my vacation time since the trip was work related.

Grandma and Grandpa Mittelstedter planned lots of fun activities for Carrie and the girls in Topeka. Before I left, we visited Gage Park, which features an awesome playground, a carousel, a train ride, a water park, and a zoo. The girls also got to visit a fun toy store, story time at the library, go shoe shopping, and explore the brand new Topeka Discovery Center, which has lots of cool activities for kids including a Strider bike track and a plexi-glass room that kids can paint. The girls also got to take a splash in a kiddy pool just about every day. Grandma and Grandpa were even brave enough to treat us to a few of their favorite restaurants in the area. The highlight for Mady was probably visiting Chuck-E-Cheese with her Grandma.

After I returned from Georgia, we had a couple more days in Kansas before we drove up to Cedar Falls, Iowa for the next leg of our journey… You can find pictures from our vacation at our Picasa Album here: https://picasaweb.google.com/carriebeyer/VacationJune2012?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKW2-7qKvs-o5wE&feat=directlink (to be continued)