72/775

That's hours and miles ...




So last weekend was yet another in our marathon of spring/summer weekends. We started out Friday evening stopping in Ada for Kappa Phi's Degree of the Rose. Then we headed to Marion, IN to hang out with Dave and Abby Burden. Marion is about forty minutes or so south-west of Fort Wayne. Tyler had fraternity business with Dave, who took over Tyler's job in the fraternity (secretary) at the last Conclave. Abby and I had a really nice time visiting too. They've been working on remodeling their house and, while they feel like they still have so much to do, it looks great and their hard work is evident. We slept in Marion on Friday night.

Saturday afternoon we took off for New Philadelphia, OH, 5 hours from Marion. We stayed with Garry and Deidra Lute that night. I felt so bad that we got there so late ... but it was good to see them. We hadn't seen them since last August at their wedding. We stayed up and chatted for a while. Deidra gave us the grand tour of their new house - which they are also remodeling. She bought it sight unseen by Garry just a couple of weeks before their wedding. They've finished ripping out the lathe and plaster walls in the entry and have re-drywalled and are waiting to paint. They still have a lot of work to do - but their house will be beautiful when they finish. The old woodwork alone is gorgeous.

Sunday morning we went to church in Urichsville with Deidra and her family. It was really good to see Mom and Dad Dudgeon again, as well as her little sister Diana. We then took off and headed for Wintersville/Steubenville, OH - an hour further east than New Philly. My step-mom's mom died on Thursday night and we wanted to go out for the showing at the funeral home. I know it meant a lot to Dad, Syl, and my siblings to see us there. Dad was shocked ... but, like we said, there's nowhere that's too far to travel for family. It was good that we went. I just wish that we could have stayed for the funeral on Monday - but that wasn't practical, we needed to work on Monday. So we left the funeral home around 3 and headed towards Columbus. Why?, you ask. Because at that point in the weekend, we'd rather make the 3 hour drive to my mom's house than the 5 hour drive back to ours. And it was Mother's Day ... couldn't hurt to see as many of our moms as we could. So we had dinner in Columbus with mom and stayed there Sunday night.

Monday morning we went to mom's school and Tyler taught her fifth graders some cool things about math. We started that tradition while he was in grad school and we've just kept it going. Mom usually takes the math enrichment kids, so they just eat up everything that Tyler talks about. She had a bright group again this year ... I was impressed with the way they followed and asked intelligent questions. I also haven't missed a year of my life without getting to mom's room at least once a school-year. The visual on her kids just makes her stories so much better! We left around noon and headed straight to school to pick up Sophie. So, by the time we got home from our Monday evening church meeting, we'd been not home for 72 hours and put 775 miles on the car. While it was a good weekend - I certainly wouldn't recommend that much travel in three days time. :P