Category Archives: vacation

July 6, 2011 · 9:21 PM

Day Four: New Friends

Exhausted from yesterday’s marathon of driving, everyone – including me – slept for over 9 hours last night. In a row! I didn’t wake up once. Interestingly, while Mike and the kids proclaimed how refreshed and rested they were, I woke up feeling groggy and sluggish. We ultimately decided that maybe it was too much sleep for me, and that my body no longer knows what to do with a regular, normal person’s amount of zzzs. Still, we were all ready and raring to go after a quiet continental breakfast at the hotel. We got some real coffee down the street, stopped to find another geocache (after spending entirely too long fiddling with the app on Mike’s phone) and headed onwards through Iowa.

Again, the ride was smooth and uneventful – “Are we there yet”s and random roadside potty breaks notwithstanding – and the day was more or less filled with miles and miles of this:

and this:

It was only six hours of driving, but the last couple of hours seemed to. take. for. ever. We were all thrilled to see the sign that signaled that we were almost to our destination.

We met up with some online friends for the first time, and it was fun, easy, and comfortable… like we hung out all the time. We ate at a local pizza place, and chatted and chatted while the kids all played video games, ran around like horses, compared notes about their siblings, and became fast friends.

It was a lovely ending to another great day, and I can’t believe how lucky we are to 1) be taking this trip at all, and 2) to have so many great people to share it with along the way.

Next stops: Champaign, IL; and Fort Wayne, IN

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Day Three: Driving, Driving, and More Driving

I have fond memories of overnight road trips we’ve taken in the past: once home from Arkansas, when we were going to Harding; once to California shortly after we’d first moved to Arizona; once when we were visiting Phoenix for the first time. They were always fun… the late night conversations, the downing of coffee and energy drinks, the feeling of having the highway all to yourself. This one was different though, possibly because we were already on the sleep-deprived side even before we’d started it, or possibly just because we’re getting ~~old~~ older. It went smoothly, for which I am very thankful, but it felt like an exhausting blur. Poor Tegan woke up crying several times in the first couple of hours, too asleep to be reasoned with but awake enough to realize that she wasn’t in her bed. 🙁 And our sparkling conversations were non-existent, mainly because I’d turned from a normal person into one resembling a surgery patient coming out of anesthesia. I was having a hard time stringing even two words together, and I was dozing off mid-thought again and again. Mike was thankfully able to manage to both stay awake and stay on the road, responsibly stopping a few times for 15 minute cat naps at rest areas when he knew he needed them.

We were all happy to see the sun coming up when we were driving through Colorado (which, by the way, I do believe is the most beautiful state I’ve ever been in)

and we enjoyed a nice – if entirely too large – late breakfast at Jack and Grill’s, home of Man Vs Food’s seven pound breakfast burrito.

Adam Richman on the wall of fame

The kids alternately napped and watched movies while the mountains of Colorado gave way to the miles and miles of flatness in Nebraska.

Our excitement for the day came in the form of heavy winds, black skies, and torrential downpours as we approached our hotel in Lincoln. Everett was in tears – worried about tornadoes – and we did our best to reassure him, even as we kept our eye on some of the more ominous looking clouds that told us that tornadoes weren’t entirely out of the realm of possibility.

But there would be no tornadoes (at least to our knowledge) and we safely made it to our hotel a little after seven. It was 10:00 by the time everyone was fed, showered, and ready for bed. I had big plans to relax and watch something on Netflix on my computer… but I fell asleep with the laptop on my stomach, not twenty minutes into my show.

Tomorrow: Galena, Illinois

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Day Two: Small Town Fun

The fourth of July. The one day of the year that I get nostalgic about living in a small town. This year, Parowen, Utah served as a lovely surrogate. We watched a parade complete with the requisite floats, horses, cheerleaders, and candy-throwing…

We grilled burgers and hotdogs. We took the grumpy girl for a walk around the block, and got baptized with a sudden and refreshing downpour. We played an always amusing round of Apples to Apples. We found a geocache (our first in Utah), and spread blankets at a local park to watch the fireworks…

After the “official” fireworks, we visited the front yard of some friends of our friends for the home-launched variety. The kids thought it was just about the coolest thing ever, right up until the second to last one, which sent embers flying through the yard, and spectators scrambling onto the porch.

We decided to leave Utah that night to get a head start on our next 19 hour leg, and we all left in high spirits: buoyed by fun celebrations, good food, and good friends.

It was a memorable and fantastic 4th, marred only by the fact that I broke a tooth on a piece of candy from the parade, as well as the sleep-robbing stomach aches that were shared by three of us (which may or may not also be attributed to poor late-night dietary choices. I admit to nothing.)

Next stop: Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Our Great Summer Road Trip: Day 1

We pulled it off. Despite my unintentional best efforts to sabotage it by stressing out trying to make sure everything was perfect, we finally got it all together. By early Sunday morning, the house had been cleaned, decluttered, and polished. Our beds all had new sheets. Our trashes had all been emptied. Our refrigerator had been purged. We had the chicken sitter, house sitter, and mail hold all in place. We’d dropped off the dog, the rat, and the fish. I even watched The Secret to put me in a good frame of mind. We were ready.

We left the house at 5:20 in the morning, and enjoyed a stress-free 9 hour ride up to Utah. The kids entertained themselves with movies, taking pictures out the window, and eating an excessive amount of Pringles. When we weren’t drinking in the scenery, coming up with scavenger hunt assignments for the kids (and giving out Starbursts for prizes), Mike and I did what we always do on road trips…. talk about everything from life to television to theology.

We arrived at our first stop at 3:00. We spent the afternoon hanging out with our friends, catching up on the past nine months, eating pizza at their local little haunt, and baking cupcakes into the wee hours of the morning.

Snow in July!

And it was good.

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April 29, 2010 · 5:58 PM

Wine on Computers

Two weeks ago, just a few days into our vacation in San Diego, Tegan spilled my entire glass of wine onto my netbook. It wasn’t a splash, it was a flood, and the computer promptly responded by making a sizzling sound, followed by a whoosh and a whine as it shut off into silence.

Now, aside from the obvious lesson – move glass of wine before two year old approaches, or better yet, no wine by the computer! – there were two other lessons to be learned as well. First, the one that’s been the recurring theme my entire life: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Yes, I was bummed about my computer, as well as the fact that we don’t currently have the money to replace it. But in the grand scheme of things, a fried netbook is small stuff! It just doesn’t matter. Secondly, it told me in no uncertain terms that I didn’t need to be on the computer while I was on vacation. I needed to be with my family, live life, and let my little online world continue to spin without me. Even now, back home with 3 desk tops at my disposal, my computer time needs to be more carefully managed, planned, and balanced. And it’s good.

Some other insights from the trip, in no particular order:

You need to stop to enjoy the flowers

Sometimes, you just have to eat straight from the carton

Elephants are cool even when they’re made out of legoes

Japanese gardens are beautiful

Roller coasters are so much more fun when you share them with the people you love

So are flumes

And rides that go up and down

Baby animals, of any kind, are to be enjoyed and appreciated

Bugs are interesting

Learning about the Marines, aviation, and World War II is interesting too

Even pretending to sit at a school desk bores Paxton

Good friends, the kind that you can see twice a year and still pick up like no time had past, are rare, and precious

The ocean is beautiful, peaceful, and awe-inspiring

And finally, it really is about the little things in life:

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September 11, 2009 · 4:14 PM

Vacation… sweet, sweet vacation

Here’s the thing:

Mike and I lived in New England for over 30 years each. I was born in Connecticut and grew up in New Hampshire, with a brief 6 year stint in Massachusetts after we got married. We’ve only been in Arizona for four years, so I understand that our thinking might still be clouded with newness (although, lots of people have decided that they hate new areas in far less time than 4 years!), but neither of us has any desire to move back east, now or in the future. So accustomed as we’ve become to the vast open spaces, I have a hard time believing we wouldn’t feel closed in and claustrophobic if we ever returned. There’s just something about driving (and hiking and camping and being) in such a majestic area that makes you feel simultaneously very alive and very small, in the best possible way.

All of that to say, when we recently had an opportunity for a first time, week-long, exploration of the beautiful neighboring state of Nevada, we were thrilled!

It wasn’t a restful vacation by any means, but it was restoring. We hiked (and hiked and hiked and hiked) and logged about 2 dozen more geocache finds. We explored the small town of Pioche, and checked out some old mining claims. We wandered through caves, and we gaped at the beauty of Zion. The boys fished, entered a mucking competition, and tasted their first deep-fried Ding Dong. We watched deer on the hill every morning, and we saw wild horses look right at us before they trotted away. We started each day with the sunrise and a great cup of coffee, and ended each day with a campfire and a great glass of wine.

And it was good.