April 17, 2009

Springtime in the Rockies

Easter Dinner

Bruce is proud of this roast

Mom's Gravesite

We haven’t posted to the blog in over 2 weeks. We drove 1800 plus miles in just over 3 days -spending an evening with Jim and Carol Stevenson in West Lafayette, Indiana along the way.
Barb’s mother passed away peacefully with family present on April 3rd and her funeral was on April 6th. Barb, her 3 sisters and all their families were present at the visitation and the funeral. It was gratifying to see the overwhelming number of people who came to pay their respects to Mom. All of her siblings were also present. The silver lining in this dark cloud of sadness was the chance to see so many relatives that we hadn’t seen in a very long time. So many of you have expressed your condolences and we appreciate your thoughtfulness during this difficult time.
After the funeral, we started working on all the loose ends. We did spend Easter with family eating a huge beef roast.
Tuesday, April 14 found us starting our drive home. We had decided to abort our trip, head home and then drive back to Ripon in May for Matt Peppler’s graduation from college. We spent Tuesday evening with Dwayne and Mary Hochhalter in Perry, Iowa visiting with them and seeing pictures from their trip last fall to Berlin, Prague and Vienna.
On Thursday, we arrived at Joan (Barb’s sister) and Jim Graf’s house in Littleton, Co to deliver some things from Mom’s house after 2 windy days on the high prairie. We talked about how miserable it would have been to cross those prairies in a wagon in high winds. We also stopped for a look at the Union Pacific train museum in Council Bluffs and Don drove a virtual train. Unfortunately, a spring snow storm is predicted for Denver and the Rockies (18-36 inches) - it is snowing hard right now - and so they are stuck with us until it eases up which looks like Saturday afternoon. So Sunday we’ll start home and hope to be back in Seattle by mid-week.