Our last morning in Omaha, our plan was to check out the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian bridge, which connects Omaha, Nebraska and Council Bluffs, Iowa. I told Ellie when we got out of the van that we were going to walk to Iowa…I think she thought we were going to walk all the way home. She just said “but that will take forever.” It was a warm day…and by the end I think she thought we had walked all the way home…instead of the just over a half mile that we did.

I’ve always said my children are better behaved when separated. I think i found the solution. Perhaps having them in different states is the way to go!

On the Nebraska side of this lovely bridge, is this great fountain that Ellie just adored. She had the best time trying to catch the water as it came out of the sprinklers…she’d run from spout to spout trying to figure out where it would come out next and ultimately miss it every time.

Once she eventually figured out if she stayed in one place, it would come back around, she got completely soaked…

Which cooled her off from the walk…and dried nicely during our picnic.

After playing, picnicking, and drying off…we headed toward our campground for the evening…Swan Lake State Park in Carroll, Iowa.

But…what is a vacation, and especially one that goes through West Central Iowa without a picture with Albert the Bull??

Once we made it to the campground, we pitched our tent…

and got started on dinner. When there’s only 4 of you, and you’ve got a whole package of hotdogs and no leftover storage system…you get creative…like the double dog with cheese…with a side of hotdog. Yum! I think Nathan probably had his quota for sodium for the week after this one meal.

But what is camping without smores?  No, we didn’t do the open flame this year. We opted for the camp stove method. We’ll leave open flame for another camping trip in the future.

Overall, camping went really well. It was beautiful weather, right up until about 3 a.m. when it started hailing. Thank goodness for wifi so i could check the weather from the tent. We, and our tent, made it through the night unscathed…but weren’t about to stay for round two which was headed for us later the next morning. We packed up in record time and headed to spend the day with Nathan’s parents.

We had decided to head for home, when we learned Dan Wardell was going to be in Ames the next morning…so we made a pit stop there for the evening in order to catch his Reading Road Trip the next morning. It was great, as always. And nice to see our favorite “Superhero Dan.” as he’s known in our house.

A brief stop at the Story City Carousel later that day…(by brief…I mean we only rode it three times)

and onward toward home.