On the road again

I have so much to say about our trip to Rexburg that I am even surprising myself. Rexburg is in The-Middle-Of-Nowhere, Idaho. How is it even possible that we took hundreds of pictures and will likely have to draft several posts to justly cover our experience?

I don’t know, either.

The whole trip was rather spontaneous. Emily came home from her mission on Tuesday and informed us that she was going up to Idaho on Saturday to meet up with a special friend of the male persuasion. It’s a long drive—four to five hours each way—so for her to go there and back in one day by herself was a little nuts. She certainly didn’t want her parents tagging along so we volunteered to go up with her, instead, and made a little vacation out of it. A final hurrah, if you will, before the semester started.

We left early in the morning on Saturday, snatching our pyjammied girls from their beds and buckling them in their car seats half-asleep, though I told Andrew we had to take Rachel back in and make her use the bathroom before we left.

She was so excited to go. She was talking to Grandpa about the trip a few days before we left and then began to quiz me on what he had just told her, perhaps to make sure he was really telling the truth.

“Where are we going on Saturday?” she asked.

“Idaho,” I answered.

“Well, why not?” she asked, “Grandpa knows!”

“I didn’t say ‘I don’t know.’ I said ‘Idaho!’” I told her.

The first thing she said when she was awake enough to talk was, “Wait, what day is it?”

“Saturday.”

“You mean we’re going to Idaho?”

That’s exactly what we mean!

The next thing she talked about was needing to go to the bathroom. She actually talked about that a lot. Probably for about a quarter of the time we were in the car. For about another quarter of the duration of the trip she complained about her seatbelt. For another quarter that she was hungry or bored. For an eighth of the trip I had the music turned up so loudly that I couldn’t hear her talking. And she was probably pleasant for that final, unaccounted eighth.

We did a lot of rhyming—it was one of the only things that we could do to keep her from writhing around in her seatbelt or kicking the back of the chair in front of her.

“My seatbelt hurts me!”

“What rhymes with me?”

“Ummm…be, we, three, tree…”

In Ririe, I think it was, Andrew almost ran over saw a pigeon and exclaimed, “Wow! A pheasant!”

“Yeah, that? That’s a pigeon,” I told him.

“Oh, I guess it is,” he conceded.

“Andrew once thought that he saw a pheasant…but soon realized that it really wezn’t,” I said, purposely twisting ‘wasn’t’ to rhyme with pheasant. “Doesn’t that sound kind of Seussical?”

“What’s a pheasant?” Rachel asked.

“It’s a type of a bird. Peacocks are the biggest kind of pheasant,” I told her.

“Word rhymes with bird,” she told me.

“Yes, it does. What else rhymes with bird?”

Do you know what we found out while we were rhyming words with bird? Perhaps you’ll notice it.

Bird
Word
Herd
Curd

We thought of words using every vowel except A. Don’t worry, though, because I’ve been thinking about it and, although I haven’t been able to come up with a monosyllabic word, I have managed to come up with a few multisyllabic ones, like leopard, orchard, or blizzard. Then there’s heard, but that doesn’t count because that’s an EA not just an A.

Evidently, it was a long trip. We found ourselves still thinking of rhyming words, feeling like we should, if we followed the directions correctly, be just about there. The only problem was we were out in the boonies.

“Does he live on a farm?” I asked Emily.

“No. He lives in Rexburg.”

“Right, but we’re almost there according to the address and we’re still in the middle of nowhere, soooo…maybe it’s possible he lives on a farm?” I suggested.

“He doesn’t live on a farm,” Emily assured us.

Then Rachel chimed in, “Hey! Farm rhymes with farmer!”

“Uh…kind of. If you’re doing a first-syllable rhyme, yes, but that’s not usually what people think of when they think of ‘rhyming,’” I told her and then teased Emily, “You’re going on a date with a farmer.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with dating a farm-boy.

Emily was still in denial when we turned up the gravel driveway and her special friend stepped out the door of his farmhouse to greet her. Much to her horror we also got out and asked if we could come inside to use their washroom to freshen up and change the girls’ clothes before leaving on our separate-from-Emily adventure for the day. They were a really nice family and even gave us a map and quoted bits of Dora for Rachel…later we’d find out that this boy’s father stopped by a store while he was out to look for a map specifically for Rachel, who he calls Dora (this isn’t the first time she’s earned that nickname).

Anyway, there’s more to come on Idaho, including pictures. I just have so much to say about it that it’s going to take more than one post. And to think we didn’t even do half the stuff on our list-of-entertaining-things-to-do-in-and-around-Rexburg list…