Driving, Family, and the Lil' Red Barn

As some of you may have heard, Nick's paternal grandmother passed away last weekend. The funeral was planned for Wednesday. She lived in Elwood Nebraska. That is where the funeral was. We left early on Tuesday morning and arrived in Elwood around 3:30.

What does one do on a 9 hour road trip to Nebraska? We did listen to some ipod tunes, but we also did some reading. I am not a big fan of books on tape, but I did enjoy reading to Nick. Our small group decided to do some Old Testament studying. So I read the summaries I found for Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. I then continued on and read the entire book of Joshua. It isn't tremendously long, but certainly took a while to read. If you haven't looked at the book of Joshua for a while, I encourage you to do so. Some of the names of people and places are TOUGH! I stumbled through quite a few of them. After I finished reading we chatted about it a bit. Before we knew it, we were in Nebraska.

Our first stop...the Lil' Red Barn. I am guessing some of you may wonder, what is the Lil' Red Barn? It is in Elwood Nebraska, the options are endless. It could be a restaurant, a bar, perhaps a church? It is the local motel. It really is a red barn shaped building. There are 5 rooms. Nick and I were in room #4, which is upstairs. We got a "suite." The accommodations were decent and suited our needs.

We changed clothes and headed to the church for the Wake. The "nice" thing about funerals is getting to see family. In this case, it included meeting family. I had met a few of these relatives for Steph's wedding last June. Many of them I had not met yet. I did find out that some of these relatives are loyal readers of my blog. (Thanks!)

Nick's dad's family isn't THAT big, especially compared to my dad's family, but there were still a lot of people to keep straight. Makes me realize just what an enormous feat it was for him to learn all my relatives. (Nick is awesome!) I do know that Jim and Kathy were fabulous hosts. Kathy is a cousin of Rollie's. They were such generous hosts. Kathy even packed a meal for us to load up and take on the road for our trip back. They were very kind.

We left Elwood around 3pm. I started driving back. To help keep us both awake, Nick read the book of Genesis. I have read the first several chapters. I did not realize how messed up things were way back then. I realized people were pretty bad for God to have wiped out all existence with a flood, but man, crazy things were happening in the book of Genesis. For everyone out there that says people just keep getting worse and worse, read Genesis! I also realized reading the OT through Esther is best done in order. Once we read Genesis I realized there were a lot of the same names of places, as well as how this and that came to be...and then we learned more about it in Joshua.

We got back home around 12:30am (Thursday) and both of us were up to go to work/school. It was a long couple of days, and made for tired people rest of the week, but I am glad we could go.

I will get a picture of the Lil' Red Barn up soon. I know, you are waiting anxiously.