Today we set out on our summer family vacation. We began the day at home in Huntsville and we’re bedding down tonight in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Tomorrow we wake up and head to Wind Cave and Mount Rushmore. We’ve been planning this trip for quite some time and I’m really looking forward to the next couple of days together.

A couple of years ago, I blogged about our big family road trip (you can read about Day 1 of the summer 2014 baseball road trip here). It was a great trip with lots of fun car games, deep conversations, plenty of good music, and some fantastic memories. I’m hoping that this trip will be more of the same.

This is the family selfie that inaugurates the official vacation journey. He’s hard to see, but Jackson is back there somewhere in the back. Not much to report today since we spent most of the day either on a plane or in a car. We did have one near-catastrophe: in our haste to get all the luggage (and children) loaded up, I completely forgot to put the garage door down. Thankfully, a friend texted me to let me know and he was able to take care of it for me.

My favorite memory of the day came this afternoon in Colorado. We were driving north of Denver on our way to Cheyenne and Sunny spotted these HUGE dandelions on the side of the highway. That led to a conversation about how we would go pick dandelions as kids and the fun we’d have by blowing the seeds and watching the wind whisk them away. We stopped for dinner a few miles down the road and as we were heading back to I-25, we spotted some more ginormous dandelions. So I made Sunny get out of the car and re-live an old childhood memory. Here’s the picture I took of her with her baseball-sized dandelion!

Stay tuned for more to come this week as the Bybee family tours the great American West!