Monday morning we woke up at Debbie's house, rather late, as it was rather late the night before when we all finally got to sleep. Early to bed and early to rise was not going to be the rule to live by while visiting Deb. By about noon, we'd all managed, in a rather leisurely sort of way, to get showered and dressed and ready to head out and find some breakfast and some scenery.
After breakfast, we drove to Garden of the Gods, which I thought was going to be a garden, but turned out to be a place with really neat rock formations. We managed to arrive just as a guided tour of the park was starting, so we got to hear some of the history and geological information about the site.
I was really glad we got to hear the tour, because it matched well with what we'd heard at the National Dinosaur Monument about how the rock structures were created -- just like the sandbar full of bones was pushed up, the rocks that were standing in the Garden of the Gods started out as sandbars (sans dinosuar bones, this time) and were pushed up to stand straight up.
Abby was slightly less impressed with the tour, which contained a lot of information about the plants that were growing there, but she liked climbing into the crevices in the rocks.
We ended up doing everything very slowly and leisurely for the rest of the day, with dinner at eight, and then we started a movie around eleven. I thought the girls would drop off during the movie, but that didn't happen, so we all went to bed around one. I did manage to get our laundry done -- four loads, after only four days! I wasn't quite sure how that happened.
Tuesday morning I woke up and started getting the car loaded up. Around eight, I made the girls get out of bed and onto the couches so that I could break down their air mattresses and pack up their sleeping bags in the space bags. We left Deb's at around nine, but then went and got donuts for breakfast, and ice and drinks for the cooler, then sort of took the very long route to the freeway, so we weren't actually leaving Colorado Springs until almost ten.
While doing research for the trip, I found a place that sounded like a neat little stop between Colorado and Kansas. The town was Burlington, CO, and its attraction was a 100-year -old carousel that had been restored and ran daily in the summertime. So we arrived at noon and found that it wasn't open until one. I was ready to throw in the towel, but the girls thought we should go have lunch and then come back so that they could ride on it. (And lunch was at Sonic, at last! It was really good.)
We had lunch, and then the girls played for a while at the nifty playground at the city park near the carousel, and then they had a ride. The carousel was amazing. It had very neat carved wooden animals with all sorts of details -- like the snake around the giraffe's neck, and the monkey on its tail, and it played organ music as it ran. By then, though, it was already 1:30, and we had places to be!
Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about the time zone change, and while I thought I might be able to make it to Topeka by 6pm, when I lost an hour as we crossed from mountain to central time, there was no chance at all. We made one stop for coffee and one stop for gas in between the Kansas-Colorado border, and arrived in Topeka at cousin Mary's house at about 7:30 central time.
The girls scarfed down dinner then stayed in the pool for the rest of the evening. It's pretty difficult to convince them that anything else is better than swimming. I met a whole lot of cousins, and had a very nice time, although I'm hoping there's not a quiz on names, as I'm afraid I would fail miserably.
Today we passed the 2000 miles driven mark. The girls seem to be holding up well with the driving. The DVD player helps a lot, and today I let Abby use my makeup bag to do whatever she wished with herself, and that was good for more than an hour of entertainment. They played gameboy games through most of Colorado, but seem to be ready for a bit of a break from that now. We now have one easy day, one medium day, and one long day of driving left before we're on the east coast!
The scenery in Kansas is nice, in a gentle sort of way. It's lots of fields and water towers, with the occasional oil pump working away on the edge of a field. The thing that strikes me the most is the billboards and other advertisements on the side of the road. We saw advertisements for a (live!) six-legged steer and the world's largest prairie dog today, as well as boards for a ton of other stuff. The towns seem to be pretty evenly spaced, as well, which is a huge difference from northwestern Colorado, where the towns were very random, and there were no billboards at all, although lots of oil pumps.
With all the driving time, you'd think I'd have a lot of time to think about things and figure things out, but that's not always the case. I saw the first Sinclair gas station in eastern Oregon, and noticed it had a little dinosuar logo, then wondered why it had a dinosaur logo. I think I was in Colorado by the time I figured out that duh, it's fossil fuel.
The different gas stations is one thing I've noticed as we've been driving. We've gone from Shell and Chevron and Texaco to Conoco and Sinclair and Route 66. I had always assumed that gas stations were all nationwide chains, and never considered that they might be regional instead.
Tomorrow we're going to another cousin's house, and will stop in Independence, MO on the way there to see the beginning of the Oregon Trail. I sort of feel like we should have gone to Oregon City, OR on this trip as well, for the official end of the trail, but that will have to wait for another day.
The first few pictures is up: here. There are a LOT more to come -- I've taken 300+ so far, but do not have time to crop all the ones I'll put up eventually.
Today was our longest driving day yet, I think. We've come approximately 1500 miles so far, and almost 500 of that was today. We started the day in Vernal, Utah. We were out of the campground by 8am, and went through our typical morning routine of stopping at the grocery store and buying ice and drinks to refill the cooler. Having cold drinks on hand is a great way to maintain on-the-road sanity.
It's a short drive from Vernal to the National Dinosaur Monument, and we were there just as they opened. The exhibit there is amazing -- the building butts up against the excavation site, and many fossils are visible on the wall. You can even touch the dinosaur bones that are still sticking into the rock formation.
The most interesting parts, though, were the ranger talks. We sat through a quarry talk and learned that the reason that so many of the dinosuar bones ended up where they did is because the dinosaurs would die in the river, then their bones were washed downstream where they lodged in the sandbar. After a long time, the ground pushed up and formed a mountain from the original sandbar, and that was what made the bones part of the outside of the mountain rather than a layer in the mountain.
After the talk at the quarry, we went on a walk with a ranger who was going to lead us on a half-mile walk back to the parking lot (we'd taken a shuttle from the parking lot to the quarry) and tell us interesting facts along the way. I'm pretty sure the walk was a lot longer than a half-mile, but it was very cool to get out into the desert a little bit and see things up close. We found lots of neat rocks, and saw a bunny hiding in a little cave. The girls both completed the Junior Palentologist booklet and got patches to prove it.
Then, it was on to Colorado Springs were we were going to find Debbie. The first stretch of road was a two-lane highway, the kind where it's far too easy to get stuck behind a really slow driver, or a big truck that can't make it up the hills with anything resembling speed. The first stretch was nice, because I was really all by myself out there, but then we got into a more heavily used area, and there were some slow times. I was really glad to hook up with I-70.
On the first highway we drove on in Colorado, we entered an area where all the hills were brown and dotted with sagebrush, stretching out as far as I could see, and then, in all of that was forests of power poles. It seemed like the power poles were running away into nowhere, but there were so many of them, it was hard to figure out what was going on. Eventually, after driving by several oil pumps, I did figure out that they were drilling for oil, but I'm still not sure what all the power lines were for.
My favorite driving so far was the stretch we did through the Rockies today. I was getting sort of tired on the way up, but when we hit Vail, I saw signs for Starbucks, and I jumped off the road and managed to find a Starbucks on the second exit (apparently they have some sort of building code where you're not actually allowed to place your sign where it's actually visible, which makes finding places more challenging than usual) and after I had my double-latte, I was definitely good to go. It's been a while since I've had even a single latte.
Right around the time we left Vail, it started raining, and it rained pretty much all the way down the mountains. But it was so pretty. All the mountains were covered in a soft sort of mist, and the trees blended together and the whole drive had a sort of cozy feel to it. For a lot of the drive, a river was running right by the road, which made it really pretty. Abby took a bunch of pictures out the window of the car while we were driving.
We stopped a lot on the way down, not long stops, but short stops, to take pictures or get a snack, and managed to arrive in Colorado Springs shortly after 9. Mapquest told me it was a seven hour drive, and we made it in just over eight hours, which, considering all the stops we made and the times I drove really slow due to hydroplaning on the freeway, is pretty good.
Tomorrow, no driving at all! That will be a nice break, although I don't really mind the driving as long as I know where I'm going. I do not enjoy driving at all when I'm lost, especially when I have places I need to be. The girls have been playing a lot of gameboy, and watching movies too. So far, they haven't complained of being too bored. When we were climbing into the Rockies today, I pointed out the beauty of the mountains to the kids. Katrina said that she was going to pass the next half hour by oohing and aahing at the mountains, and she did, for about five minutes. Then Mario was calling her again, and she answered his call.
When Debbie and I were seventeen, we went on a road trip with her parents and grandparents into the Canadian Rockies, and we were perfectly happy to entertain ourselves by playing cards and endless other silly games, or just reading. But that wasn't enough. We were supposed to be having a cultural experience, which seemed to mean looking out the window a lot and the unchanging view of rocks, snow, and trees. So I'm trying not to do that to the girls, but it is nice if they manage to look out the window once or twice per state, so that when they discuss their summer vacation there's more to it than how many states they played super mario world in.
Today we were on the road by 8:00am, with a goal of making it to Salt Lake City by noon, where we had plans to meet Abby's third grade teacher for lunch. We zoomed through the rest of Idaho and arrived in time to study the map for the next leg of our journey before her teacher arrived.
Lunch was very nice, and we got to see the new baby, who's now almost two.
After lunch, we started towards Vernal, Utah, which is just a few miles away from the Dinosaur National Monument, which is tomorrow's big event. I tried to get on the freeway we'd gotten off of for lunch, going south, but the entrance was closed. Not so easily thwarted, I made my way down to the next entrance to the freeway, but that too was closed.
Still, not listening to fate, I found yet another entrance and finally got on the southbound freeway. I really should have gone north.
My biggest map of Utah is one that the tourism department sent me, and it's a bit lacking in details in some places. Like how it doesn't always list the names of the highways. The important highways. The highways that I really need to know about.
So we wind our way down the highway that I think is taking me where we want to go, and we seem to be going towards the mountains that I know we need to get across. I know there's only one road across the mountains, because I've looked at my map. My really good map.
Eventually, after passing a couple of creepily identical churches, we get to a ranger station where they're collecting fees. I point at my map and girl ranger rattles off a couple of directions which I completely ignore, because, you know, I have my map. She says that if I'm not stopping, I don't have to pay, so I cheer silently and hit the road.
The scenery is gorgeous, and I assign Abby the task of opening her window and taking pictures while I drive. After a while, the road forks and narrows, and the signs are sparse and none of the things they're pointing to are on my map. I try to remember girl ranger's directions, but can't, really. So I shrug and we had onward and upward. And upward, and upward. There's lots of markers for trails and things of that nature, and we keep climbing and climbing, and by the time we've passed our umteenth trail marker turnout, I decide that I picked the wrong fork. So we get out of the car and take some more pictures of the gorgeous scenery, and then we're off back down the mountain to try the other fork in the road.
That was not an improvement.
We apparently stumbled onto what must be heaven for ATV enthusiasts, as we see dozens and dozens of trailers carrying dozens and dozens of ATVs. I get past them the best I can on the endlessly narrowing road, and eventually, I get to a little booth that marks the entrance to a campsite, where the road then turns to gravel. This was definitely the wrong way.
At that point, I'm feeling quite lost, exceedingly annoyed at the general lack of maps and signs and directions, and tired of the woods. So I check my map and find that a little bit north of where we stopped for lunch, there's a big highway that also takes me across the mountains, so I get out of the forest and back to the highway and then, with no more misturns, we make our way to Vernal, Utah, where there are approximately one hundred and fifty nine dinosaur statues. I'm guessing.
Tonight's campground is the 'Dinosaurland' KOA, and it has a pool, so once I've set up camp the kids decide to wake up and go for a swim. Then, we drove into town to find dinner, and got pizza. The pizza was pretty cool, because we ordered one of the premade ones and the guy just grabbed it off the rack and handed it to us, and we had our pizza and were on our way. I don't think I've ever even gotten a hamburger as fast as that was!
The girls played on the teeter-totter after dinner, and would have continued that for much longer if I hadn't pulled them off because I was sure one of them was going to lose some vital limb if I let them at it much longer. Katrina managed to fall off twice in about five minutes, because tetter-tottering isn't any fun if you don't bash down as hard as you can, or kick sand at your sister to attempt to blind her, or better yet, both.
Tomorrow we're off to Colorado Springs to see Debbie after we check out the dinosaur site. She hasn't seen the girls since they were one and two, so I'm really looking forward to it!
Today was full of many exciting crossings. We crossed the 45th parallel, which is halfway between the North Pole and the equator, we crossed into Mountain Time, and we crossed from Oregon into Idaho. I'd never been to Idaho before until today! Which is rather shameful, considering I've lived in either Oregon or Washington my entire life.
We started the day with a wandering tour through 'Historic Baker City'. The buildings were so amazing, all brick, with neat little finishing touches. I keep thinking I need to learn more architectural terms so that I can describe the buildings I really like in terms besides 'cool' and 'neat stuff on them'. One day.
After discovering that the bakery we'd been looking for had closed, we found a Safeway where we foraged for breakfast and then made it to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center by 10am. The center was very well done, and it had a lot of very interesting exhibits. One activity that the girls really liked was a miniature wagon with a bunch of blocks that were labelled with different things the pioneers might have wanted to take. They wouldn't all fit, so which should be taken? I couldn't do it. There was no way I could choose to leave the trunk of heirloom items behind! But the bacon, and the flour! And we'd definitely need the chest of warmer clothes.
I was totally feeling their pain, too, because I had to stand on the bumper of the car and bounce up and down on the trunk today in order to get it to close. I took everything out this morning too, and thought I was packing it more efficiently than I did yesterday morning, but I guess yesterday's configuration was better.
After walking through the center we watched a show by 'Buffalo Bill'. He played several different instruments and sang a bunch of songs. While it sounds like it could be cheesy, it wasn't. Two adorable little girls who must have been around four were sitting in the front row with us and one of them would spontaneously start dancing every now and then.
He sang one song about Lewis and Clark, and the way he described them, I was totally thinking 'sitcom!' Take two guys, one native american single mother, one cute kid nicknamed 'little pomp', put them all together in the wilderness and add a one-eyed guy who is, get this, the hunter for the group. In one episode, the hunter shoots one of the lead characters in the rear end. Hilarity ensues.
After leaving the center, we continued to drive down I-84, which goes through a lot of hills that look like they started out as piles of junk and then someone threw a big brown tablecloth over them and tucked it all in really well. And, for effect, tossed on a random tree here and there.
We stopped for lunch in Ontario, Oregon, which I was looking forward to because it was the first place we could eat at Sonic, whose cherry limeades and tater tots I quickly grew addicted to while in Texas last year. I even found it, and was v. proud of myself for navigating through a town I didn't know at all to find the correct address.
Then, it was closed. (Do you see a theme to the day, here?)
So we ate at the little hamburger stand across the street, which was good, and then were on our way to Idaho.
Comments from the girls when we crossed into Idaho: "Yay, we're in Idaho!"
Comments from me when we crossed into Idaho: "Yay, I can go 75!" Oregon's limit is only 65, so that was a nice change.
We used the AAA books to find our campground for the night, which has a pool, so the kids swam after dinner. It's really windy here, which made putting up our tent was quite exciting. I had to have the girls hold down the corners while I strung the poles through, and then the ground was really hard, so Abby borrowed a hammer from the neighbors so I could pound the stakes in. Usually, I wouldn't bother if it was that difficult, but I figured our tent would get to Utah before we did if I didn't.
Now the girls are done swimming, and we're in the tent with the wind blowing all around, debating about if we're going to go shower tonight or not. I think at this rate, we'll wait until morning. We're all feeling sort of settled in for the night at this point.
Today we managed to leave town at 12:45pm, which should really be considered record time, considering I didn't get home until noon. The weather was cloudy and sort of raining sometimes and the hills were topped off in mist as we climbed towards Snoqualmie Pass. We hit the pass at 1:30, and the temperature sign said it was 55 degrees. I kept putting my sunglasses on, then taking them off, as it was not really bright enough to wear them, but a little too bright to be without them.
After we went over the pass, the weather changed dramatically. The sunglasses went on for good, and so did the air conditioning. We arrived in Ellensburg at around 2:30, and stopped for a late lunch of pizza. The kids had slept for most of the drive over, as I'd kept them up late last night burning music CDs for the trip. You know, important stuff.
I loved the drive from Ellensburg to the Oregon border. It was all gorgeous hills and farmland stretching out, and it made me remember the endless rounds of The Farming Game that Debbie and I played during summers when we were 12 and 13. The game was invented by an Eastern Washington farmer, and as we drove by the places that parts of the game had been named after, like Yakima and Wapato and Toppenish, I could almost see the acres of fruit trees as the little red stickers that signified fruit in the game, and the herds of cattle as the white '10 cow' stickers.
We got to Pendleton, Oregon around 5:30, and drove around for a very long time looking for a grocery store. We might have been a little bit faster if I hadn't been so entranced with all of the old houses and neat old buildings that we saw as we drove. The town is sort of run down, but in a charming kind of way, and the architecture on so many of the houses and other buildings was so cool.
Eventually we found an Albertson's, and I was so grateful that I signed up for an Albertson's card. There, we bought hot dogs and buns and chips for dinner, then we hit the road for the Emigrant Springs Campground, and arrived 7ish. Abby set to work building the fire, and Katrina and I got the tent up, and then we roasted hot dogs and made smores.
After dinner (and after putting out the fire!) we went for a walk, and checked out some of the Oregon Trail information and displays in the park. At one point, I spotted a historic sign, and encouraged the girls to come look at it. For a few seconds, Abby thought I was talking about the 'No Parking' sign across the parking lot, and she thought I'd completely gone round the bend. And on the first day even. She probably thought the next three weeks were going to be quite a trial.
The drive from Pendleton to the campground was up, up, up. In several places they'd blasted through hills to make the road not quite as steep, and it was pretty amazing to think about the pioneers with their covered wagons traveling on that same path. The pass just before the park is called Deadman's Pass, but we haven't gotten the full story on why it was named that.
Today's distance: About 300 miles.
In other news, the site has changed to reflect my on the road status. And while I'm not technically on the road at this moment, I will be in a few hours. Yay!
I'll be posting some sort of quick update daily, or several times a day, and those will not send out notification email. I'll make regular updates as often as I can, and those will send the notification email. I will actually report on every day, but won't be able to post the full update every day, so sometimes the updates will come in batches of more than one.
It's an exciting moment, as I'm writing my 100th entry.
Okay, maybe not so exciting.
What is exciting, though, is that I have a car that's mostly packed, three duffle bags full of clothes on my bedroom floor, and a fairly reasonable to-do list.
We also bought a couple of those space bags last night (as seen on tv!) and were happy to discover that they worked pretty well even without a vacuum. We had a bit of a debate in the store over whether they would or wouldn't work, and if it was or was not worth getting them.
But now we have two sort of flat sleeping bags that took minimal effort to be made flat, and they'll fit in the car a lot better than a non-flattened sleeping bag. Overall, I think we're doing well for space, but ask me again on Thursday at noon. I may have a different answer at that point.
I think I have time to load a few more things in the car before I go to work!
The countdown's on....
This weekend, I spent pretty much the entire weekend in Bellingham, where I cut up a lot of fruit, among other things.
I wasn't planning on staying the whole weekend, but somehow, I just never went home until Sunday evening. So that pretty much blew my 'go home and accomplish lots of stuff' plan.
I am, however, managing to complete some important tasks before I leave. Things like watching the rest of the season of Angel, so we can delete it off of TiVo and have enough room to record all of the new Monk and Dead Zone episodes that will be airing while we're gone. I have also been looking up various parks and other places to stop at along the way, and creating a document that notes the major towns on our route and how far it is to the next major town, so that if we really need to buy ice cream, we'll know where our next opportunity is.
Other chores that need to be completed are watching the rest of the Arrested Development shows, and printing out my list of activities that the children might use to occupy themselves in the car. Because, you know, the 84 hours of audio books, 40 hours of DVDs and the gameboys with at least a dozen games they've never played before might not be enough for the 110 hours of driving we'll be doing.
After that stuff is all done, I'll toss a sleeping bag and maybe a change of clothes in the car, you know, whatever's clean and lying about, and then we'll be off.
Okay, I kid. I am also spending time figuring out what sorts of non-entertainment items we will need to bring. And I'm approaching the time now where I can actually start setting stuff out to pack, as opposed to just making lists, then promptly losing the list, then starting over again.
The girls get out of school on their last day at 11:30, and I'm hoping to be on the road by 12:30 that day. That might be a bit optimistic, but I refuse to give up my hopes that one week, two days and one hour from now, we'll be on our way to Ellensburg.
Tonight is Abby's birthday party, and there's a living room full of seven girls right now, who are supposed to be going to sleep, although I have my doubts about how much sleep is currently being had.
Before bed, they were racing around doing makeovers and singing at a volume that I thought was really too loud for how late it was, but they were totally oblivious to the lateness or the volume.
Earlier in the evening we ate pizza, and went to the park, where the funniest event was watching a group of four teenagers, three boys and a girl. They buried the girl in the sand, and put quite a bit on top of her so that she was just a head sticking out. Then they spread bread on top of the sand and tried to lure the ducks on top of her. The ducks did not need to be asked twice.
After doing that for a while, one of the guys tried to get her to hold the bread in her teeth and see if a duck would take the bread right out of her mouth, but she wasn't going for that. So he decided that he'd try it, without the benefit of a pile of sand to disguise his true nature from the ducks. It didn't take long before he was whooping it up because one bold duck stole the bread right from his teeth.
But in spite of all that excitement, the really big news of the evening was that I found out that I've been accepted to the MBA program at the UW. I checked my email sometime in the middle of the pizza, and I had an email telling me I was in! Now the next three years are definitely coming into a lot clearer focus. It looks something like this: go to class, go to work, study, go to work, go to class, wash, rinse, repeat.
But in spite of little to no free time for the next three years, I am really excited about the program. It looks like I'll learn a ton, and that it will all be interesting stuff that I can really use right away. Plus, I get to buy new school supplies this fall. And I totally love buying school supplies.
This morning I had an appointment to take my car in for a tune up and general looking-over. I had looked up the location of the repair shop and happily found that it was right on my usual bus route. Yay.
So after I'd taken the girls to school, I drove my car over to the shop and dropped it off, then took off for the bus stop. Execept I couldn't find it. In fact, I couldn't find any bus stops.
I'd written down that the stop was at 79th and Redmond Way, and realized that I was on 70th and Redmond way, which seemed farther than the 0.2 mile that the transit site said I'd have to walk, but not impossible.
After a minute of not being sure which way to go, due to Redmond Way running sort of diagonal, which means that it crosses north-south streets whose numbers increase, and east-west streets whose numbers decrease, I started towards town. And I kept going and going and going. And at one point, I found 76th street, and thought, yay, almost there.
Haha. Those diagonal streets will get you every time.
I kept walking, and walking, and endlessly walking. I decided that if nothing else, I'd walk home eventually, and then at least I'd be somewhere.
Then, there was an intersection up ahead, and I had high hopes that it was the magic intersection. And sure enough, before I even read the street sign, I knew it was.
Do you know how I knew it was? Because, in a heartbreaking moment of really bad timing, when I was still 1.5 blocks away from the intersection, my bus swooped in and swooped out, leaving me still a block away from where I needed to be.
I arrived, read the sign, and realized that was the last bus for another half hour. So then I walked (more walking!) down to Jamba Juice and got breakfast, which seemed like a small reward for all the walking I'd done.
I have now looked up where the auto place really is, and what bus I really need to take to get back in time, so have much higher hopes about the afternoon trip. The car place hasn't called yet, either, so I'm hoping that means that there's nothing unusually wrong with my car.
Yesterday, Abby and I bought these necessary items for our trip:
I am having lots of random thoughts about organization on the trip, which includes urges like rushing out to buy fabric and make many various-sized drawstring bags that will be the cornerstone of our organizational efforts on the trip, and will hold things like all camera supplies, etc.
Luckily, I am old enough to realize that this is my natural inclination when facing a large project (to focus too much on organizational efforts and not enough on getting things done), and that my natural inclination isn't always right. (It mostly is, but just not on this topic!)