Back to the grind

We had a wonderful time during Christmas break and are sad to be away from our families. It was a whirlwind two weeks making time to visit with friends and family; yo-yoing between Okemos and Grand Rapids and making trips to Caro and Commerce on the other side of the state. Our trip back was uneventful until we got to St. Louis. We were going to visit the REI store which we don't have in Springfield, and see if I could find a decent pair of warm gloves. I called ahead for their hours and with our GPS in hand, we drove confidently into St. Louis content to the fact that we knew exactly where we were going.

This was until we happened upon a plethora of orange signage and an abrupt end to the interstate. We figured "hey, we'll just follow the detour, no problem." However, the detour was to the zoo and the space center, neither of which we wanted to go to so we chose the zoo thinking that was the most appropriate destination for us. The GPS during this time was having a corinary, recalculating our route at every intersection and trying to direct us back to the highway, which was a large muddy trench. So there we were: Atalie, the driver, with a "what the heck do you want me to do" look on her face and I, the navigator, just telling her to turn at the next intersection ("which way should I turn" "I don't know, try left"). After a long 10 minutes we stopped, reconfigured the GPS to ignore highways, then arrived at REI only 20 minutes behind schedule. Appropriately, I didn't find any gloves- Atalie did. I love St. Louis.

Work started back up on Monday (yay) and this morning Atalie and I started our first morning jog. We received some exercise clothing for Christmas (thanks!) and decided we should use it. Hopefully we'll be able to move enough tomorrow morning to get up and do it again. That is all from Springfield- have a good day.

[Atalie will hopefully be participating in this blog in the near future]