Road Trip Post #6 - First day for family!

Friday, June 19th

We woke up and after getting dressed and saying hi to family in the dorm common areas, the girls and I drove to Bismarck, ND to pick up Tim from the airport! By the time we parked to walk into the airport, the girls and I had driven 1,745 miles from Texas.

After many hugs and kisses, we drove back to the family reunion. Along the way we had to stop in New Salem to introduce Tim to New Salem Sue, the world's largest Holstein cow. She's quite the icon on I-94.

Family photo with New Salem Sue.

The girls tried climbing her.

Tim tried milking her.

Tim tried to get Eight to milk her.

 We continued back to the Elkins family farm where everyone else had already enjoyed lunch and chatting. We got my dad to take the girls on a tour of the farm through his eyes when he was their age. This was my first experience with seeing something so huge in my memory as a child, then seeing it again as an adult and it was so much smaller than I remembered.

The family farm house with original outhouse that I don't think anyone uses anymore. I used to think this house was HUGE as a child, but crazily the inside was just as I remembered.

My dad's first cousin still owns the farm, but rents the land. No one uses the barn anymore.

Here are two of the hog barns. One was for sows and piglets and another was for sows without piglets.

Back when this was "free-range parenting" my dad and his siblings could play to the property line, which was all the way to the horizon on the left of the picture and to the stock pond in the middle of those trees.

Granddaddy giving Eight a piggyback ride through the tall grass to hopefully avoid ticks.

The front porch and side door we always used were just as I remembered.

After the family farm tour, we got back into the van. My sister rode with us and purposefully didn't walk down memory lane because of the ticks. Who had a tick on her in the minivan? That's right, my sister. We kicked out the tick and drove back to the Abbey to get ready for the first official event: the family dinner with introductions, silent auction and entertainment.

I thought about reviewing the family dinner, but decided against it since it's only a family reunion treat and won't be around for another 2 years. Plus you have to be related to me to get an invite!

The silent auction was a hoot! One of the four-year-old cousins found a homemade princess pillowcase and begged her grandpa to bid on it for her, then hid the bid sheet! One cousin is a professional artist and she grabbed a painting off her bathroom wall right before she walked out the door to come to the reunion. Her painting went for the most money! We brought hand printed tea towels with a Texas flair made by a fellow Girl Scout mom. I scored a nifty fabric microwave baked potato bag and breakfast rolls. All the money raised went to help offset the cost of renting rooms and catering meals for the reunion.

After the silent auction, we had family introductions so we knew who belonged to which one of my great-great grandparent's children.

A panoramic of the whole family during the introductions.

After family introductions, we were treated with a musical performance from The Larsen Brothers. Paul and Lowell Larsen are my dad's mom's first cousins, but closer to my dad's age. They are not professional singers, but have such a rare sound with cowboy and gospel music, they were sent from the North Dakota Tourism Department to be musical ambassadors to Norway in 1999. My girls were so fascinated, they picked seats in the front row!

Why yes, we are that family who sits around and sings for entertainment after dinner.

This was my first family reunion since 1997 when I graduated high school. College and the Army took up nearly all my free time and dictated my schedule. I was happy to share this family reunion with my little nuclear family!

After looking around, I discovered that most of my generation was back at the dorm, playing cards, and catching up. We were given freedom to chose as adults whether or not to participate. When we were younger, we weren't given that choice.

Flashback to the early 1990s when my aunt the music teacher taught us a song and skit we cousins performed for the talent show.

I loved watching my girls interact with the older generations! After the music, we went back to the dorms and had "conversation" with storytelling. Eight loves this and tried to persuade us to let her stay up all night talking!