I have learned that with road trips I do much better leaving in the afternoon. The reason, my mind is always thinking and planning. So I never sleep well until I am on the road. Instead of be up half the night and then leaving at dawn, we left late afternoon and drove about 4 hours. 5 miles from our stop I got pulled over. My cruise control is broken and I ended up going 86 in an 80. I was hoping he would just give a warning, but no, a $40 ticket.

We stopped at a campground. I had put some taco meat in our little travel crock pot, so dinner was ready when we arrived. .

I could not decide if we were going to set up a tent or just rearrange things in the van. I opted for the ban, which was not the best idea. It took me way longer to move things around than set up a tent

Since it took me so long to set up the van for sleeping, lots of mosquitoes got inside. We killed probably 30 of them. We would end up opening a door and the inside light would come on and more mosquitoes fly in. The boys ended up with lots of bug bites.  I actually would have slept much better if I had left Joseph in a reclining seat and I had had a little more room to move my feet.  My pad was pretty comfortable.

The birds starting waking me up around 4am. I finally woke boys up at 5:45 and we hit the road. Our next stop was only 5 hours away. We planned to meet a friend for the night, so knew we had an easy day. We stopped at a rest area on the edge of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

In Bismarck we stopped at the Heritage Center, which is next to the Capitol.  Very cool stuff.

All of my kids earned some money for the trip and this little guy was just not happy until he found something to buy in the gift shop.  He really likes his stuffed animals and this guy is Slush.

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We stayed the night in Bismarck and they boys got about 4.5 hours in at the pool. As you can tell from the pictures, we had a great time!