Chickens and Bugles

I am typing this on our laptop while traveling in our car. I think this is so neat! This is our first laptop – we sold two desktop computers to get it. The other thing we got that I really like is our gps. It has been fun playing with that – especially for Joe. When we first got it Joe would just drive around the neighborhood to see it work – almost going off the road in his fascination. It’s cool how you can set different sounds to points of interest. Like I have the gps set to notify me if there’s a Walmart nearby by sounding a bugle, and for campgrounds it moos like a cow. Now all we need is an iphone to be complete. :o)

Our first day on our adventure was pretty uneventful. It was really windy and driving with a loaded car with a ‘bigmack’ on top made it a little difficult. We saw a lot of farmland in Iowa – mostly windmill farms and chicken farms – which smelled very bad. If you’ve ever watched Food, Inc you’d see why. Then we got into Cedar Rapids Iowa and that was really stinky too. They had factories belching out smoke and it smelled like they were processing the chickens from the chicken farms. I also saw a herd of deer running through a corn field which was very neat and unexpected.

Windmill farm and chicken farm:

Jadyn is doing really well on this trip thanks to Joe. He has an arsenal of voices that he uses with her to keep her entertained, some of which are Mr. Nezzer and Mr. Lunt from Veggie Tales, mean aliens, good aliens, little mouse, big giant. I am the voice for Tinkerbell and Little Star: Star is a star in the sky that is her best friend and she comes down to play with Jadyn.  Her latest thing is to ‘burp’ on everything and everyone (for pretend). Joe will pretend to be Mr. Nezzer from Veggie Tales (or Mr. Nezzard as Jadyn calls him) and she will tell Mr. Nezzar to burp on Mr. Lunt. So Joe will say ‘b-u-u-u-r-p’ and Mr. Lunt will scream and Jadyn just laughs and laughs.

Last night she got scared driving in the dark because she said she saw ufo’s and mean aliens. So Joe turned it into a game where they would take turns ‘burping’ on the aliens to make them leave our planet because it became too stinky (because of the burps.) Then they were burping witches off brooms and blasting off to other planets (Jadyn’s favorite is “The Love Planet” that she made up).

Our car - stuffed to the seams.