Monroe-Read Reunion

Last Friday we headed to Madison, Wisconsin for the Monroe-Read Reunion. This is my mom's side of the family and they get together every other year. It was a good time as always.

On Friday, Claire and I headed north with my parents and Trever came after work with Kirk. Claire was an amazing traveler and slept the entire trip up and back!

We made it to Madison and after a little bit of visiting headed out to dinner with Aunt Carol, Uncle Rog and mom's cousins Helen and Dwight from Minnesota.

Here is Claire and Grandma Marge at Claire's first Chinese Restaurant.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel and hung out with our extended family and waited for the boys to arrive. Trever realized that Claire and her Great Aunt Carol were wearing the same outfit!

During the night we were woken up by a car alarm in the parking lot. We checked it out and realized that there was one heck of a storm going on outside. The next morning we found out that our car had some serious hail damage. I think there was only one car from our reunion that escaped without damage.

We had breakfast Saturday morning, visited with relatives, and then took Claire on her first college visit to the University of Wisconsin campus. I don't think she was a big fan! :) We went to the student union which is set on a very nice lake. We had lunch and ice cream and the rest of the crew had a couple of pitchers of beer (that doesn't happen on the U of I campus!) and checked out a little bit of campustown.
Saturday evening we enjoyed a nice cookout on the hotel patio with some amazing strawberry shortcake.

We had a great time catching up with relatives and meeting some new ones. Claire met her 3rd cousin, Ainsley Brown, and they really enjoyed each other. We look forward to taking Claire to the next reunion when she'll be old enough to play!