Nate, Danielle, Kadence, and Oliver: 311 Day

I haven't had time to update the blog lately and this post I just dumped the pics and had to run. So, here is the story behind them. Nate and I decided not to go to 311 Day in Vegas just because we have seen them multiple times and we thought it wasn't worth it. So we didn't get tickets, but Matt was talking Nate into coming down and going with him to the concert. We tried to get tickets from my sister Steph because Tyson was out of town that weekend so they couldn't go. But they jacked up the price for their own flesh and blood. Steph says they could sell them online for a lot more so she was being nice by even giving them to us. I wasn't going to pay extra for the tickets when we weren't really set on going to the concert anyway. So, I decided to ask Janice. I knew she wouldn't jack the price up for her own family and she didn't. So, we bought the tickets from Janice and headed to Vegas.

So, the trip was overall a nice getaway. Nate had fun at the show. He said it was a little long though. We hung out with the Wiscombe fam, always a good time. We went swimming at Mandalay Bay thanks to Jordan and Tahna. We had to buy swimming suits for the 3 of us because we weren't expecting to go swimming. It was a little on the cold side but it was fun. Kadence loved the water. Julie and I had a night out to ourselves with no kids. The boys went climbing in strong wind and almost blew away. We brought up lunch and met them for a little picnic and a hike to a waterfall.

But it wasn't all good times. . .

Kadence doesn't know how to sleep anywhere but her bed so that was hard. The 1st night I think she averaged waking up every 3 hours. The next night she did better but we didn't want to chance it again. We were planning on leaving Sunday morning, but decided to leave Saturday night and Kadence could just sleep in the car. That was a huge mistake. We didn't check the weather and there was a huge snow storm that hit. It has been a long time so I don't remember all the details, but it was horrible. We had been driving in the storm for a couple hours and we were coming up on the Filmore-Beaver area and we read online that the storm should clear up a little past Beaver. So, we trucked through going less than 30 mph and of course the storm didn't let up. Kadence woke up and was getting sick of her seat. We decided that there was no way we could make it. We decided to get a hotel but the next town was Filmore which was about 2 hours away at the speed we were going. We finally arrived after midnight and I made a joke that there will probably be no rooms at this hotel due to our horrible luck, and little did I know there were no available rooms along the whole freeway where the storm hit. We had Kadence out of her seat so we sat there letting her play for a little while until we had to hit the road. We got back on the road and Kadence fell asleep easily then I fell asleep. When I woke up we were going 90-100 mph and we were out of the storm. We ended up getting home at about 3:00 in the morning. It took us about 8 1/2 hours to get home thanks to Nate's speedy driving. We were very lucky we didn't run off the road or get into any accidents because we saw a lot of cars run off the road. Later we found out that the whole highway was closed on and off for accidents. At one point it was closed for over an hour. We were very lucky. Anyway we made it safe and sorry Matt and Julie it will probably be awhile before we visit again. We are a little traumatized.

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