Our Trip to Mt. Rushmore

I haven't posted to the blog in a week. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine e-mailed and harassed me for not having anything new online. I didn't post because we were on vacation and there was no Internet where we stayed. It was rough, but I lived through it...only because I could at least get e-mail on my cell phone.

But let me tell you about our vacation...it was quite a thrill. We have some friends who have a lake house on Lake Granbury and they let us stay there for the week (see pictures below). But I can tell you are already getting ahead of me looking at the picture of us at Mt. Rushmore. Lest I lose you with the boring details of the rest of our week, let me jump right to this picture. When we arrived in Granbury, we needed to buy groceries. The store we visited appears to be based in South Dakota, so they were having a drawing for a free trip to Mt. Rushmore...all expenses paid. The trip included airfare, a rental car, two days in a hotel and trip to Mt. Rushmore. They asked us if we wanted to register for the trip (to be given away that evening), we laughed about it and said "sure". They said the winners would be notified that evening, so we gave them our cell phone number.

Monday night we were watching an episode of 24 on DVD when my cell phone rang. Thinking it was Brooke's family or mine, I answered the phone without looking at the caller ID. When the voice on the other end asked for "Mr. Hurt", I figured it was not our parents and I was not happy to be getting a sales call on my cell phone. You could have blown me over with a feather when the man said we had won the contest at the super market! The guy said we could take the trip any time within the next 90 days, which was a bit of a problem since we were already on vacation and could not take another one in the next 90 days. I wrote down all of the information he gave me, took a phone number where I could reach him and filled in the blanks for Brooke who was freaking out hearing only half of the conversation. To make a long story short, we found out we could leave on Tuesday evening, fly to South Dakota, stay Wednesday and Thursday and then fly back on Friday. Man, talk about spur of the moment. And if you've been reading my blog, you know I've been working on being more spontaneous, but this was ridiculous! So we called our families and let them know of the change in our plans, threw our clothes back into the suitcase and headed to DFW late Tuesday afternoon.

We planned on spending a week at a lake house, not in South Dakota, so we did not do too much while we were there. Amanda swam in the pool at the hotel and I had to survive on the Internet I could get on my phone because the hotel's high speed Internet connection was down. We did manage to make it to Mt. Rushmore. Brooke had never been to Mt. Rushmore before, so we got somebody to take our picture with the presidents in the background. Like I said, we didn't do much else while we were there, but it was nice.

At this point, I need to ask you a question. If I had told you at the very beginning of this posting that the most exciting thing we did this week was read, swim in the pool and lake and watch DVD episodes of 24, would you have read about our vacation? I ask, because I have to be honest with you. I made up this whole story...at least about the whole Mt. Rushmore thing. The picture above was taken with a green screen. I spent about 30 minutes this afternoon doctoring up the picture. It looked so cool I had to do something with it, so I concocted this story. Did you fall for it?

In all reality, we stayed at the lake house Monday-Thursday and came home a day early. Amanda watched lots of movies, Brooke and I read, Amanda swam (all the photos below are real) and Brooke and I did watch DVD episodes of season one of 24. I was excited to finish (finally) reading Making Small Groups Work which I have been working on for a few months now and I read another entire book, a novel entitled Lethal Agent. We didn't fly, stay in a hotel or see Mt. Rushmore, but we did have a good time relaxing and being together as a family. It was fun...although possibly not as interesting as our trip to Mt. Rushmore!

-Rob