Sonya's Blog - Day 25 - Waiting for our visitors

Sonya’s Blog - Day 25 - July 17 - Waiting for the Relly’s

Today we are just hanging around the campground. Blake’s sister, Suzanne, comes today with her husband, Adam and their three kids - Claire (5), Kate (3) and Simon (1). We are very excited for their arrival.

The first thing I need to take care of is paying our missed tolls. They don’t make it easy for you. We went through several tolls that were not manned, which meant you needed to throw money in the bucket, however, they only accept change. We had about 50 cents on us and we needed a $1.10. Once you are in the tolls there is nothing you can do, but there was a sign that said we could pay online. So we tried to pay online, but we are out of State and out of Country and it would not accept our card. So we had to mail it in and we had 7 days or we would be in violation. We had written down the name we were exiting onto, but did not realize they had plaza numbers. So you cannot trace missed tolls with your license plate number, you have to write down the ones you missed and they each have numbers, which is what they want. So we had to go through their very un-user friendly website map and figure out which roads matched up with which numbers. Then I had all the one’s written down and the toll amounts we missed and I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to send it. Well I am supposed to have one page per toll missed, that wasn’t going to happen since I already had them all written down. Then they wanted a certified cheque or money order, that wasn’t going to happen either. They were lucky I had US cheques, they sure don’t make it easy for tourists to pay their tolls. I finally got it mailed off, in the end it was $10 in tolls and it took me over an hour to figure it out. Lesson learned, just carry a bucket of change with you when you are touring around the Chicago area. Super convenient.

I cleaned up the RV and did laundry and all that maintenance type stuff. Went to the pool and played mini golf with Blake and Isaac. Natasha was only interested in reading and watching a couple of shows and taking it easy after our two long and busy days in Chicago.

We then starting prepping supper so that we could eat when Suzanne and Family got here. They arrived just after 5 and there was much excitement and noise and running around. They had been stuck in traffic and the kids had a lot of pent up energy from the long drive. We managed to get some supper in there, but the little ones were more interested in playing and telling stories and hanging out with our kids.

Simon Helping Isaac with his reading:

The girls wanted to sleep in our trailer with our kids so we set up the kids bedroom and the sleepover began. There was much talking and goofing around before any sleeping actually happened.

Finally Asleep:

Meanwhile we played a game outside, Ticket to Ride. I just want to say that I dominated and won that game with my amazing game playing skills.

That’s it for the day,

Sonya