Our Trip to IL!

Wow, we had such a fun weekend visiting my dear friend Danielle, and her family in Illinois. Caleb, Daniel, Elijah, Anna, Micah and I headed up early Thursday morning, and made the 12 hour drive, with only one stop!! :) We all visited the restrooms pretty soon after we got there. :D It was so neat getting to meet everybody, although we'd heard so much about them it seemed like we knew them already. :) It was really pretty up there, SOOO many corn fields!! The farms were beautiful though, just looked picture perfect.

Gabrielle, Dannie and I

First off they showed us around their place, they have about 5 different barns, but this one was just SO cool to me, I loved it!! It was absolutely huge, on the first floor were horse stalls and stuff, and then upstairs it was pretty much just open space, with a swing, and a trap door going down to the first floor. I had to try out that after Dannie didn't think I could climb down it...lol had to show her I could! :P


We played some volleyball as well, and then after a wonderful dinner, we saddled up the horses and rode until dark in the paddock, and then we came inside and sat around and talked and played games.



Lots of four wheeler rides too, Jordan has two of them, so it made for a lot of fun. Although Anna and I had to KEEP reminding the guys to be careful!! :D I had a lot fun four wheeling with Dannie, it was pretty cool riding around through the lanes in between the fields, and seeing all the farms.



Friday morning we played more volleyball, and then took the horses out and rode them up and down the ditches next to the highway. It was a long stretch so you could get going pretty fast, it was so fun!! I love riding, although since I don't do it much I ended up being pretty sore. :D And then a couple people got thrown into the pool, first Micah, (that was quite interesting to watch!) and then Daniel.




That afternoon we went to a park that had this really neat creek, the water was FREEZING right next to where it came out, but once you waded out a bit it wasn't quite as cold. We went way down the creek, and got pretty wet, the water came up almost waist high sometimes. On the way back we ended up climbing up the bank and going back down the trail, it was pretty slow walking down the creek because there were so many rocks and you were always tripping. It was a lot of fun, all of us really enjoyed it. We stayed up REALLY late Friday night talking and playing games, until almost 5:00 I think! It was great!


Saturday, we picked blueberries at the neighbors house, they tasted so good, we ate tons of them just while we were picking, but we still got several cartons full to take home. And then right after lunch we loaded up and headed to the Belvedere county fair. Dannie and I decided to wear denim skirts and boots...problem is the skirts were shorter and didn't come down to the top of the boots, so it looked rather interesting! :D




Since it was a county fair I was expecting it to be rather small, but it ended up being really big. We walked through the animal barns, and of course the goat barn :P and the guys looked at all the tractors and stuff. They were having the draft horse judging going on while we were there, it was so cool to watch, you could stand right next to the fence and it was so neat seeing them come flying by.

Isaac looking at the goats

And then at 4:00 it was time for the rodeo! There were a lot of riders from Oklahoma, and one bull rider actually from Guthrie, we thought that was so cool!! It was a great rodeo, we had so much fun! We sat pretty close to the bucking chutes, so Anna was able to get some pretty neat bull riding pictures.




After the rodeo we walked around the fair a little more, and then headed back home. Dannie and I had to stop and take a picture sitting in this John Deere tractor tire. :)


We stayed up late again Saturday night, mostly just talking and the some of them were playing a computer game, everybody was just laughing at them trying to play it! :D We headed back home at about 9:00 Sunday morning.

It was such a great trip, we all had a wonderful time, thanks so much for having us Lee family!