Brock's Conference Finishes :O)

I drove Brock to the hotel this morning so the kids and I could have the car later in the day to run around. We started the day with pancakes and bacon and the kids decided they wanted to try to make something they'd read about in their history book...hardtack. It was the main food of the soldiers of the American Revolution and sailors and the book described it as biscuits that are hard as a rock and often full of weevils, and gave instructions on how to make it, so of course the kids all wanted to try it. Each kid mixed and kneaded their own little biscuit and baked it up. I think Brynna's quote as she ate hers was, "This would be better with butter and brown sugar." But they kept the experience authentic and ate them plain. They seemed disappointed that their biscuits weren't quite as rock hard as they expected, but we decided that must be because they were fresh from the oven and they ate them warm. Soldiers of the American Revolution would've eaten them after they'd sat on a shelf for days possibly.

One of my chores was to get the laundry going and I headed over to the campground laundry room and because there was a change machine, I started three loads in the washers thinking I'd just get some more change to dry, but when I checked it, the change machine was out of service. I got our foldable bike tuned up so that it was operational again and rode down to the park's office to see i
if they had quarters. They didn't. So I added going to a laundromat to our to do list for the day with three loads of wet clothes.

After breakfast and cleanup, we set about getting ourselves ready for the day, and assigning the chores that we'd skipped during the week. After less than an hour, we had a sparkling fresh trailer and the kids went outside to play. I spent 45 minutes to an hour on google maps trying to map out our route of stops finishing up at Brock's hotel to pick him up from his last day of the conference. Woohoo! We were planning to hit the laundromat first, then a Goodwill since we needed a couple of clothing items and the kids wanted to check for rollerblades. We needed some specialized light bulbs for one of our light fixtures which I found before at a Home Depot so that was one of the stops on our route. Lastly, I added a Walmart because Brock needed a 4 GB usb to repair his malfunctioning laptop.

The first laundromat was so crazy busy that we just got back in the car and decided to keep our eyes open for another one (I forgot it was Saturday and the first was located near several very large apartment complexes). We found another laundromat not too far away and that one seemed to have some openings so we threw our clothes in the dryers and sat in the car reading and playing games while we waited. That took less than an hour and we moved on to finding the Goodwill.  I was excited because a few years ago when I came with Brock to the conference, I'd had a fun successful shopping trip at this same store. This time it was a total bust. We combed the store for the items on our shopping list and after about an hour and a half of searching, we left completely empty-handed.

We continued on our route where we saw a Kmart and I decided to try there for the usb drive thinking that would save us the Walmart stop and it was right on the purple line on our gps. I found an 8gb usb in the shape of Yoda for the same price as the 4gb plain one. :O) I found a pair of jeans for Sky that were on sale and Brynna a pack of socks. I found some bulbs that I thought would work in our light fixture (they did!) I also picked up some Heet to add to our gas tank since we think we got some bad gas. Overall, I was happy with the Kmart and didn't need to make any more stops. I texted Brock to see how close he was since we were about halfway between the campground and the hotel and I thought it would be nice to just pick him up. It worked out to head that way.

We picked up Brock and Harald and decided to all go out to Steak n' Shake for dinner. Hey, it's decent food and its cheap. What we didn't know was just how cheap it would be, turns out on Saturday and Sunday, kids eat free so Spence and Sky's meals didn't cost us anything. After dinner, we went back to the hotel to drop Harald off and headed back to the campground. We all were ready for bed.