Well, here I am in Iowa City, Iowa. Wednesday morning I made the decision to leave Thursday morning. Wednesday afternoon I just thought leaving immediately was best, so I told Mike and Annie to pack up and we would leave around 6 pm when Annie was done with work and ready. I didn't get any nap time in between going to bed at 2 am, getting up at 9 am and leaving at 6 pm. Leaving Wednesday night turned out to be perfect. We took the southern route due to bad roads in Wyoming. As expected, we encountered lots of rain on the way out of Utah and partly into Colorado, but the roads were completely dry through the high country of Colorado and we did not see any of the snow predicted to fall. That made the trip go much easier. Annie juiced up on energy drinks and drove for 8 hours. I managed an accumulated total of maybe 2 or 3 hours of sleep, so I took over driving. I drove for an hour or so but it was very foggy, so I decided to pull off at a rest area for 45 minutes to rest and let the fog clear. The fog just moved further down the road, but I wasn't as tired so I continued driving. After another hour or more we finally got out of the cursed fog. The dawn broke too, making staying awake a little easier. After Denver all signs of real life disappeared. Most cities were off the freeway or blink-and-you-miss-them in size. Mike switched off to drive for a bit while Annie and I slept more. Eventually we made it to Nebraska and then Iowa. In Iowa I took over driving again. During that stint of driving, we put Annie's car over the 100,000 mile mark. We celebrated the occasion with a cheer. There was a small storm that I guess put a bit of snow in Des Moines, but the roads were dry when we got through. Other than the rain and fog, we had no weather problems. We arrived in Iowa City right when we expected to at 5:20 pm Thursday. A couple hours later, the family arrived from Virginia.

I was EXTREMELY excited to have my guns brought out from Virginia. Unfortunately, my family is lazy and refused to pack the van the night before, so when they crudely threw in everything minutes before leaving, they somehow had no room for my guns. To say I was bummed out would be an extreme understatement. I had been waiting for a long time to finally have my guns so I could go shooting. The perfect opportunity came and the perfect opportunity was missed. So, sadly I will not be going shooting anytime in the foreseeable future.

Today we found one of the few hills in Iowa and went sledding. It's snowed 5 inches or so today on top of the couple inches left from their last storm, so sledding was great. It's actually still snowing now. We'll definitely have a very white Christmas here. Christmas is actually today for us, by our German tradition. We had our traditional bratwurst dinner with sauerkraut and rolls and great gravy, followed by streuselkuchen and cookies. Usually we wait playing games until midnight and wait for St. Nickolaus to come. When the Christmas tree is plugged in and lit up, we come out and open our gifts. Tonight, I don't think we're waiting until midnight. Everyone is tired from driving and sledding, so we're doing Christmas early. Tomorrow, we'll just play board games and do stuff like that. I prefer this format to the regular Christmas morning.

Just a heads up, I will be overhauling my blog after the holidays. I know the play-by-play of my days is so exciting, but it bores me, so I'm going to either make it into some sort of video blog or something more interesting where I talk less about me and more about other things. I'd like to increase my following and see if I can get lots of people interested in my blog.

Merry Christmas!