The Noehren's

I always love a good road trip, so we were super excited to tag along with Brian on his ACSM annual conference in Indianapolis this week.  The Hilton front desk lady hooked us up with an awesome corner suite on the top floor down the hall from the pool.  It was awesome! Grant was claiming his bed.   After settling in we checked out the beautiful war memorial statue in the center of town just a block away.   Then we got Brian registered for his conference and headed out to The Old Spaghetti Factory - a family favorite (especially since that is where Brian and I had our first date in SLC and got all twitterpated)   And of coarse we swam our hearts out! Day 1 was a success!

Day 2 the kids and I headed out while Brian conferenced it up.  He pretty much left before we woke up and got back after we were asleep for the next 2 days so he missed all the site seeing fun.   But he had a great time going to the latest presentations, presenting a few himself, and catching up with old colleagues.  Our hotel was right between the war memorial and the capital building so we checked it out on a whim and were pleasantly surprised at how beautiful it was. The dome. Here is something kids from their generation don't see - a real phone booth!  They thought it was cool. We spent the rest of the day at the Children's Museum.  Man!  It was great.  Great enough for us to enjoy for 6 whole hours!  Here are a few random photos from the day: This glass sculpture was pretty cool! The Rube Goldberg machine was a hit.  We came back to it a few times.  It ran off of pool balls...

Day 3 we headed to the Zoo for some outdoor fun. The birds were a huge hit!  They want to go visit Aunt Cara's to see all of her birds.  Grant and Haley enjoyed the cheetah race.   It was a hot day so we headed back for a late afternoon swim then called it a day after some chickfila.  We were beat!

On our final day we went to the top of the war memorial and toured the civil war museum in the basement. From the top we saw another cool looking monument a few blocks away and decided to go check it out too.  I'm glad we did.  It was another monument to all that have served in all the wars.  Pictures don't even capture how pretty it was inside the main room, called the Shrine.  It was breathtaking, and moving. Then we toured the museum in the basement, where each of the kids were able to learn new things about our country's history and those who have fought to defend it.  I made sure to teach them about their Great Grandpa Hariton driving a tank in WWII and Great Grandpa Noehren serving in the coast guard.  It was actually a really neat, unexpected teaching moment about the seriousness of war. After the rain died down we walked down to the beautiful canals and went paddle boating.  Here is the brief ...