Just about this time last year, Cindy’s sister was being released from the ICU at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, IA after emergency heart surgery. We had made two road trips to visit her there last June, and we’re happy to say that she is doing very well.

While in Des Moines for a total of seven days between the two trips, we spent maybe 4 hours outside of the hospital itself. What little we did see seemed nice, so we thought we’d make a point of returning on better terms.

So, on the books for the weekend, we’re taking a 2nd three-day weekend for the road trip west. The plan will be for us leave Friday morning and spend a good part of the day in or near the downtown area. Cindy’s family, who live about an hour north of Des Moines will be meeting up with us Friday night and staying the weekend as well.

Then, we’ll have all day Saturday to explore the town together and even pick up a little baseball at the Iowa Cubs game Saturday night. We’ll all be staying in the same hotel downtown, so that works out rather nicely.

With all that’s going around here with BBQ’s and the baby, we haven’t had much time to just sit back and relax. This has turned into a much different year than we had anticipated after our trip to Door County at the beginning of the year. Some of our friends from the Maui Photo Festival last year just wrapped up an amazing week of Paradise Bootcamp on the island, wish I was totally interested in when I first heard about it in February.

And with our little one on the way and building up our baby war chest, we scrapped plans to return to Maui for the 2nd annual photo festival event. After all is said and done, we knew what we were getting into and are very, very excited with where this year is going to end, but it’s nice to still have these little weekends to look forward to.

Let’s only hope it will turn out better than our trip to Lake Geneva in April.