We try to visit family in Minnesota at least once a year, and July is usually the best time. Good weather, the 4th of July holiday, and of course the kids are out of school.
Minnesota Summer

We try to visit family in Minnesota at least once a year, and July is usually the best time. Good weather, the 4th of July holiday, and of course the kids are out of school.
Grandma Moe hired a photographer to take photos of the family, so we took the opportunity to snap a few of our own with the kids dressed up. Some of these are sweet, most are weird or goofy. There are a lot of them so scroll through at your own risk.
If you’re going to visit Minnesota, do it in the summer. The 4th of July is always the best time of year there, and this year was no exception. Beautiful, hot weather, swimming, boating, ice cream, bowling, and parades. Kari even snuck in her 20th high school class reunion.
Kari and the kids few home to Minnesota for a weeklong trip to see Marcus graduate and leave for the Air Force. The kids were excited to spend time with family and loved flying. Kari, you should add a few notes here since I wasn’t along on this one…
Rather than try and go back and separate out each event that happened over the last two months, here’s a bunch of photos from that time. The main reason I’ve missed so much is our camera had a series of unfortunate events… but we’ve got it back now so I’ve no longer got an excuse […]
We try to make it back to Minnesota at least once a year, and common sense usually dictates that it occurs during the summer months. Since we missed going last year (as a family) all together, we decided that it would be nice to head back for the Holidays. So it was Christmas with the […]
We considered flying back to Minnesota this year but opted for 2 days (each way) of torture in the car instead! We saved a bit of money this way, and also learned what high level, concentrated stress feels like. Actually it really wasn’t too terrible, we got a portable dvd player for Tory and Tegan […]
The second of our twice annual treks back to the homeland landed on Thanksgiving this year, which is a perfect time to be in Minnesota. Though repeatedly warned of the bitter temps, the weather was a balmy 30 degrees most of the time, and we got outside quite a bit. The airplane ride there was […]
Here are a few pictures of Kari a couple of days before Tory was born. At this point we figured we still had a couple of weeks to go. Little did we know this was the last chance we’d get to get some good pictures of the pregnancy. Glad we did! She is 39 and […]