Thirty hours

Before I’ve recovered too much from The Drive, let me tell you about it. It was 30 hours long. We passed through 8 states and experienced sun, rain, snow, hills, mountains, flats, trees, plains, rocks, cities, wilderness, clouds, and stars. I felt like such a mercenary pushing through all of that scenery without stopping to enjoy it. Late on a clear night in Wyoming I was dying to get my binoculars out and do some star gazing. Later in Utah I wanted to stop and stare at the gorgeous, rugged mountains. I resisted the strong urge to turn off onto a scenic byway.

When you have 1900 miles to cover and only two days to do it, you have to be a mercenary on the drive or you’ll never get home. We only stopped for gas, and we used the bathroom at the gas station. Thank goodness for Jay’s adult-sized iron bladder. We stopped 3 times on day one, and only twice on day two. It was hard. The first day there wasn’t much to tempt me, since we spent all day getting through less-than-scenic Nebraska. But the second day things started getting beautiful. I love this country. Someday Jeff and I will drive slowly through the whole thing and stop to admire all of the beauties. This time, though, I settled for some high-speed (you know, 75 mph) photography.

65 miles from our motel in Rawlins, Wyoming, and 14 hours into the drive, we ran into a nightmare. This is NOT something I wanted to see after a day in Nebraska. It started snowing and we rolled along at 3 miles per hour for at least half an hour before we picked it up to 20mph. We got to the First Choice Inn a whole hour later than I planned. Grumble. And all we found for dinner that night was nasty Burger King. Yep, Day 1 was pretty blah.

These kids were such troopers. They were so tired when we got to the hotel at 11pm that they couldn’t walk straight. It was kind of cute in a pathetic way.

Motel breakfast, and then back on the road by 6am.

Spring weather is volatile, especially when mountains are involved. We went from this…

…to this, in a matter of 50 miles.

Ha, I love this picture. We listened to Harry Potter on CD a lot, but we listen to that on almost every drive so I was heartily sick of Harry, Hogwarts, and the threat of Lord Voldemort. So on Day 2 we listened to pretty much our whole mp3 player of music. We started off easy with some Debussy and Strauss, which, by the way, is a very melancholy way to pass through Wyoming. Then we moved on to a little more energetic Mozart, Beethoven, and Piano Guys. From there it was all over the place, from Amy Grant to Queen. From James Taylor to the Mo Tab. You get the idea. I have a weird, incomplete music collection and it makes for some rather diverse playlists.

Chick-fil-a for dinner. My favorite, although food in general starts getting blah after two days in the car.

Aw yeah, sunglasses:

The clouds in Oregon were so swoopy-floofy-poofy:

I named this little guy Johnny. Johnny Raincloud. Hey, you’d start naming clouds too after 25 hours in the car.

A little more snow up in the Blues.

The children started getting wild and restless around 5pm on day two. They kept whipping each other with their blankets across the back seat. Sesame Street to the rescue! Everyone I talked to about long road trips with kids swore up and down that movies would save the day, but Jay and Rose only watched one or two Sesame Street episodes each day in the car. Maybe it’s because the headphones were too big, I don’t know. But they were pretty mellow back there most of the time without movies. There were some weepy moments too, of course, but they were good little travelers for the most part.

A blurry picture of the breathtaking sunset that I drank in as we decended from the Blue Mountains. Ahh, the sky just opened UP and it was a giant DOME of beauty with a buttery ball of sun sinking in the middle. I had to turn on some Mozart, Tim Janis, and Howard Shore to supplement the beauty of the scene. I always say I love the thick woods of the Appalachians best, but give me an enormous sky full of sunrise or sunset, and I’ll be happy too.

Give me my husband and my sweet kids and I’ll be happy anywhere! [yes I love cheese]

I’m so glad we’re done with that drive. It’ll be a few more days till we get all the kinks out of our legs, but it’s over and we’re home. Goodbye, surreal world of vacation and travel! It’s back to the real world for us, with real things happening.

Like gutters blowing down.