"When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky." - Buddah

Most things in life that we prepare for don't work out the way we plan.  Even more likely that they won't go as planned the more you prepare...

I'm beginning to see that people who can accept the above statement in a positive and fluid manner are happy people.  Constantly happy people.  I know some of these people, I sometimes feel like I'm one of them, but then I have a "day" and the next day I look back and think - "whoa, woman, you need to relax"... I have a good friend (that I know won't be reading this because she doesn't have a computer) who has two children under the age of 3 and just moved to a more remote location that I did.  She is one of the only people I know that doesn't have Facebook.  Hmm, I may be seeing a pattern here...  The time or two I have seen her in some form of "distress" I didn't realize it was that until days later when I was reassessing the situation and I put myself in her situation and thought, that would have put me on the floor in tears!  How does she do that???  What I'm trying to point out is that you can live through stress and use it in a positive way, I know someone that finds joy in EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF HER LIFE.  I'm jealous.  I'm honored that she has allowed me to stay as close to her as she has so I can maybe learn a thing or two.  I hope everyone has someone that they can look to.  I hope that everyone has an aspect in their life that they can recognize as something to "work on"- it keeps one humble.

I'm keeping a list of Things That Amaze Me as we pull out of a drive way in Michigan for the last time in probably a good chunk of years.  Stay tuned for those :)

Here is our Snap Shot View of our drive from Northern Michigan to Central North Dakota.

674 miles.
10-11 hours, start to finish.

The first 10 min in the car leaving MI was the only time she wanted to play with her activity table and all the toys I packed her...go figure.  An entire bag of well thought out car friendly kid activities and she didn't want to touch them...

This is the start of the Great Mississippi.  Well, not officially, but it supposedly starts in Minnesota, and we crossed the Mississippi.  We couldn't be any more North in Minnesota, so this HAS to be the start of the river...in my opinion.

Best road food = cold pizza!

This was our long stop.  It's about 9ish, maybe a little earlier.  It was really good to stretch legs even though we were only about an hour from stopping for the night.

 

For once I'm thankful for the delayed picture taking of my phone.  When he thought I had pushed the shutter button he wasn't making a family friendly gesture (go figure), and then he laughed about it thinking he ruined my picture.  Ha!  Jokes on you!!!!  I win :)  See, sometimes things turn out really nicely when they don't go as planned ;-)