Summer Iowa trip

 My trip to Iowa this summer was great. Especially since it marked a new chapter in our lives. After being friends for years, Rusty and I are perusing a relationship. It's amazing dating your best friend. After visiting Iowa this year, he came back to Utah with me to live.

I flew out to visit with Rusty, his family and all my Iowa friends. We went with our friends, Justin & Lacey to pick out wedding invitations. We are planning on flying back out in October for their wedding. Rusty will for sure since he is in the wedding party and I will too if I can make it work. I felt like I couldn't commit to being a bridesmaid since I'm not a 100% sure I can make it back out since the kids will be in school then.

We got to hang out with friends quite a bit and still stay home and relax a lot. Since Rusty was moving many of his family wanted to spend time with him and took us out to eat many times. I felt pretty spoiled.

Even though it was the first part of June, the weather was pretty hot. Sadly, the fireflies weren't out yet; I didn't see a single one. It felt like 100 degrees many days. We were glad to have a thunderstorm roll though and cool things down for a few days. Since it was a pretty big storm, the storm sirens started going off. I cannot believe how loud those warning sirens are, almost deafening since the tower is right by Rusty's house. It was a little unnerving and I was thankful it was for a thunderstorm and not something worse. It made me think of the people that have to run for shelter every time they hear them go off for tornado warnings.

It was fun going though Rusty's things from his childhood and hearing stories about him and his brother, Tyler.

 One of the restaurants we went to had the craziest decorations. It was decorated right out of the 80's with flower prints and pink everywhere and a bunch of random chachkies; such as a random blue fish by the welcome sign. We BBQ'd a lot at home and had many delicious meals. We also visited Tyler's grave and took flowers and balloons on his birthday.

 A bunch of us went out for hot wings one night. Our friend, John asked the server what flavor he would suggest and it happened to be the second hottest flavor they have on the menu. Personally, I wouldn't dare eat something with "Habanero" in the title but the expression on his face as he ate one was priceless! We were laughing about it for days. Altough, it was so hot and burned his mouth so he didn't eat anything else after that, so we did feel a little bad for him.

Because we had Rusty's stuff to pack and bring back with us, we thought riding the train would be much more fun & relaxing than driving nearly 2000 miles ourselves. I had not rode on a train since I was a little girl and Rusty never had. I couldn't wait.

Just before we started packing everything up, I called Amtrak to ask a question and found out our train was canceled! I was so glad to have called. The train station we were going to was a three hour drive from Rusty's and it would have been terrible to have some one drive us all that way only to find it was canceled. Due to flooding on the tracks in Nebraska the train was not able to run. We had to change our plans a few times and were worried we wouldn't be able to ride the train at all. Though all our crazy running around in the last couple days, trying to make our travel plans work, we did take some time so enjoy the scenery and visit a beautiful park to relax a bit.