August 16 - Finally writing about our last day!

We've been home for two weeks, but I'm just now writing about our last day in Chicago. We got up fairly early and walked to the Sears (now called Willis) Tower, which was two blocks from our hotel. 

Since we arrived at the tower shortly after 9:00 a.m. the line to get to the top was very short. In the one picture the girls are standing beside a wall that showed how many of them it would take to reach the top of the Sears Tower. We watched a short film about the construction of the building. I enjoyed the informational movies, but the girls were getting tired of them, so they weren't too excited to be watching another movie. The elevator ride to the top took less than one minute, but they have a guide and a short clip to watch on a t.v. as you ride. One of the fascinating things at the top of the tower is that there are three glass enclosures that you can walk out on, and then you are looking straight down through glass to the street below. I was a little scared, but Jerry pushed me out on one. I stayed out for only a few seconds because it did give me a weird feeling to be looking so far below my feet!

It was also neat to see the river that runs right through the city of Chicago. 

We got back to our hotel by 11:00, packed up our things and got on the road by 11:30. We were 10 hours from home, so we thought that we would travel as far as we could, with the slight chance that we could make it home. 

The roads we traveled on had lots of tolls. We spent almost $31 in tolls to get into PA. Around 8:00 p.m. we stopped for dinner at this Mexican restaurant in a town a little north of Pittsburgh. As we were waiting for our food I asked if everyone would like to stay in a hotel here and make it home Saturday morning, or keep driving and try to make it home that night. Everyone said, "Go home tonight!" without any hesitation! 

So we continued on and made it home Saturday morning at 1:15 a.m. We did want to say that we weren't in Maryland for the whole month of July 2009, so around midnight we were getting close to the Maryland border and we were getting worried, so Jerry said that he would pull off the road and wait in PA until after midnight if he had too. I got the GPS which has a world clock on it, and as we were still traveling in PA we all counted the seconds down to the month of August! It was fun. 

Once we got inside our house, we kissed and hugged each other goodnight. It seemed so weird that we could all go to our rooms to sleep after being together in the same room and van for 6 weeks! No one really went to sleep until about 2:00 a.m. because we were all so excited to get home.