Wedding road trip part one

A couple of weeks ago, we packed up into the van and headed to the wild, exotic openness of southeastern Idaho to be in attendance at the wedding of these two awesome people:

Chuck's darling cousin Rachel and her Taylor! Rachel is one of the 'Pennsylvania cousins' (although she's in Rexburg for school right now) that we don't get to see very often. We missed Lehi's wedding last summer in Portland, so we made it an extra priority to be able to be at this one - and we're so glad we did!

We left Friday late morning (despite our best intentions to leave Friday earlier-morning, you know how that goes) and were delighted to get to the hotel at the same time as Grandpa and the Blues. We sent Pops, Melissa, and Chuck inside to get us all checked in and the kiddos (and me...) had a fun reunion in the van!

Clyde and George were especially happy to see each other again :). Also, sometimes when I see pictures like that one in the bottom left, I understand why people (myself included) have a hard time telling Clyde and Will apart, hahaha! In the meantime, more and more family arrived (Great-Grandma Thomas, Aunt Sue, Cousin Nickie, etc) and we all congregated in the living room area of the little 'house' that Chuck's parents were staying in.

Once everyone was settled in, we walked down the block to the hot springs pools, wooo! This was the main draw for our hotel and the little town we stayed in - coincidentally called Lava Hot Springs :).

The kids were all in heaven - especially Jack, which surprised me. I stayed near the edge, but he happily went much further in with Chuck and loved it.

Next it was time to hold hands, walk the opposite way down the street a bit (love small towns!), and meet up with even more family for dinner.

We ended up taking over the banquet room of the local diner:

Top picture (in no particular order): Grandma Thomas, Mom and Pops (holding cousin Jared's sweet baby Raelyn), cousin Rebekah with her cousins, cousin Lehi and his wife Brei, cousin Jared and his wife Amanda, me and Chuck, our boys (in a booth corner), George (ditto), Courtney, Lily.

Bottom picture: the booth on the left is Aunt Gina's family - stepmom, dad, brother, brother-in-law, sister; Uncle Bill and Aunt Gina are at the table on the right, and then it's an overlap of the previous picture.

Whew! After dinner we went back to the hot springs for a little bit longer and then took our tiiiiired boys back to the hotel, where the two older boys fell asleep pretty quickly and Jack reminded us why our carefree road trip days ended so abruptly when he joined our family, haha. I sneaked out and let Chuck get him to sleep while I hung out with Courtney in their hotel room for a bit instead (thanks again honey!).