Transit, Day 2

The second day was by far the longest.  From just north of Denver to just north of Boise, Idaho is roughly a 13 hour drive.  Fortunately, we'd kept ourselves on Central Time, so it was nothing for us to get up by "6 a.m.", go get some free hotel breakfast, and hit the road.

I don't stay in hotels terribly often, and I suppose it had been a while since the last time I had a free hotel breakfast, but this one was pretty great!  They had the usual fare (bagels, pastries, yogurt, coffee, and juice), but they also had a couple of surprises:  hard boiled eggs and a waffle making station!  It was awesome!

Ahem, anyway...  After a full and gloriously free breakfast, we hit the highway and headed north into Wyoming.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect out of Wyoming.  Was it going to be boring like Kansas?  Mountainous and awesome?  Some sort of weird, half desert?  As it turns out, it was a little bit of everything, except boring.  Initially, near Cheyenne and about halfway across the state, Wyoming is covered in a flat, rolling plain with mountains looming on the horizon.  It looked a little something like this (and yes, I did have a wicked road sunburn):

It's not so hard to imagine vast herds of buffalo grazing, or cattle being shepherded along by cowboys to their summer pastures.  It was pretty easy to get lost in all of the romance of the "wild west".  We were in it!  And to be honest, it was pretty gall-darn beautiful.

As we headed west, closer to the mountains, the landscape became more dry and rocky.  Little foothills started to crop up around us as we slipped through a gap in the Rockies.

On our way through these little foothills, we started to see billboards for a place called Little America.  They had 50 cent ice cream cones!  Free WiFi!  Fresh fruit and souvenirs!  Marble showers!  It sounded like a pretty great tourist trap, and I was going to need gas, so we decided to check it out.

Little America was like a little oasis of civilization in the vast stretches of nothingness that spread out around it.  It was a small complex of brick buildings: a gas station, a truck stop, a hotel, and some little cabins for rent.  When we pulled up to the gas station, our car was nearly assaulted by a window washing teenager (he actually made me jump ... I wasn't expecting it at all).  He was very friendly, asked us where we were from, where we were going, and made some small talk.  I filled up the tank, and we headed inside.

As it turns out, Little America was a tourist trap, but not as awesome a trap as I was expecting.  They had the usual kitschy souvenirs (wolves and eagles painted with Native American designs, expensive local snack items for the road, decorative knives and belt buckles) and a vast selection of the convenience store food and beverages.  It was pretty boring, as it turns out.  But they had a little hot dog stand/restaurant, so we grabbed a couple of 'dogs and sat down for lunch.

Okay, only one more bit from Wyoming, and then it's on to Utah.  The bigger foothills (we were listening to podcasts, so ignore the audio):

Much like Wyoming, I didn't really know what to expect from Utah.  Other than creepy Mormon billboards all over welcoming home "Elder So-and-So", which we saw plenty of.  Going into Utah, the mountains became huge, towering beasts of red rock.  The road wound through them for quite some time.  From the border all the way to the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the views were pretty breathtaking.  See for yourself!

We never really got into SLC, just close enough to see a few of those creepy Mormon billboards I mentioned before.  North of the city, we drove through a scrubby little forest and the land started to flatten out.  It was on into Idaho we went!

Yes, Idaho.  As I look through our collection of pictures and videos, I realize we didn't take any pictures or videos of Idaho.  Because ... well, Idaho is boring for the most part.  Flat and treeless as Kansas, except for the little bits of cool canyon carved out by the Snake River that the highway brought us close to.  It made for a pretty painful last three hours of a very long day of driving.

There was quite a bit of construction as we neared Boise, but traffic was light.  By the time we rolled into town, we were once again exhausted and hungry.  We checked in, grabbed some fast food dinner, and passed out knowing that tomorrow was the big day!

Transit, Day 1

Three solid days of driving.  I'd meant to post every night during the trip, but plans change.  Sometimes they change quite unexpectedly.  Like when you leave to start a road trip halfway across the country and only make it three blocks from your house in the first three hours...

We had spent a lot of the previous evening and most of the early morning packing the car on Tuesday.  It was hot.  Really hot.  We were both dripping sweat, and the car was packed to the ceiling.  So, when it was finally time to hit the road, I didn't think twice when I heard a kind of gravelly "pop" from the back end of the car.  I figured the car had gained a few pounds so a little gravel-grinding was to be expected.

Two blocks later, though, my tire pressure sensor started to go off.  We both heard the flat tire flopping around behind us.  When we pulled off into our friendly neighborhood QuikTrip, the tire was completely flat.  Chad went in and bought a can of Fix-a-Flat.  But when I was backing the car up to get the valve stem in place, he found the culprit.  A great big screw stuck in the tread!  Knowing at that point that the Fix-a-Flat would do more harm than good, we did what any responsible adults would do.

We called our parents.

Now, this isn't necessarily something we would normally do.  Normally, we'd jack up the car and pull out the spare, take the tire to get it patched, and be on our merry way.  In this case, though, the spare tire was buried under all of our remaining worldly possessions, and to get to it, we would have had to unload all of those possessions out onto the sidewalk at a QuikTrip in midtown Kansas City.  Not going to happen.

My mom was the first to answer the call.  She left work and came downtown with a jack and some tools.  Once we got the tire off, we noticed that not only was there a big fat screw jammed into the tire but a nail, too.  Oddly enough, it was right next to the screw, maybe four inches closer to the inside of the tire.  Now, getting a screw in your tire in your own driveway is strange enough, especially since no one around us is really doing any sort of construction at all, but a nail too?  And I heard the tire go as soon as I started backing up.

Strange, isn't it?

To make an already long story a little shorter, we managed to get the tire fixed.  My mom is a super hero.  And after standing around in the hot Kansas City heat for three hours during this whole ordeal, we were sweaty, tired, and ready to hit the road.  Onward to Denver!

The drive across Kansas was, as usual, uneventful.  I'm pretty glad to say that I'll most likely never have to drive across that state ever again.  I've heard the argument that the Flint Hills are gorgeous blah-blah-blah, but really?  The drive across Kansas is like six hours!  The Flint Hills are, at best, an hour of that drive.  Yes, they're pretty.  The rest of the state, however, can suck it.

And at first, Colorado wasn't much better.  It was flat, and there was nothing to look at.  Fortunately, though, you can see really far,  so you can see a whole lot of nothing.

There's one part of the drive into Colorado that changes all of that.  I noticed we were slowly climbing uphill (mostly because I couldn't convince my poor little loaded down car to go fast anymore).  We went over a few long hills and, over the crest of one of them ... the whole world seemed to open up and spread out below us.  We'd come over the ridge of a huge valley!  Suddenly, being able to see really far was really cool...

Not long after, the Rocky Mountains came into view on the horizon.  Chad had never really seen the mountains before (other than the mountains in Tennessee on our road trip to Florida last year), so I think he was pretty impressed.  Not only with the mountains, but with the sudden, crazy little storms that seem to pop over them.

Just before dark, we ran into one of them.  We could see it coming for a while, and I kept checking the radar to see whether or not we would run into it.  We did eventually, and it looked a little bit like this:

One of my favorite things about the Midwest are its storms and the crazy shapes the clouds make.  Right before it started to rain so hard we couldn't see, Chad got a picture of a prime example.  Probably the lat crazy Midwestern clouds we would see for a good long time:

Fortunately, the storm was pretty brief, but the clouds stuck around.  It got dark not long after we'd passed through the storm, and we finally made it to Denver.  Our hotel was just on the other side of the city, in Westminster, Colorado.  After being somewhat led astray by our GPS and taking a few perfectly legal U-turns, we arrived at the hotel, checked in (it was a lot easier than we thought it would be), and grabbed a bite to eat, we passed right out.  It had been a long day, but the next day was going to be even longer...

Pre-Transplantation II

Tuesday.  Tuesday is the day we leave.  And it's already Saturday...

At least it's finally starting to look like someone is moving out of here, though.  I mean, as long as you don't look at the kitchen.  Or the bathroom, for that matter.  But most of our stuff is gone.  Some friends just came over and hauled off Chad's desk and most of the bed.  Garbage is going to the dumpster practically by the truck-load.  Our stuff is mostly packed and piled together in one place, and I think it will all fit in the car.  I hope.

It's hard to believe how much stuff a person can accumulate.  By stuff, I mean junk mostly.  That's one thing this move will definitely accomplish - getting rid of all of the clutter.  We've taken a long hard look at our "stuff" several times and made some tough decisions on what's really important to us.  Have we learned anything from it?  Probably not.  But I do know one thing...  There will be a lot more art and music making going on when we get there!

And hopefully less wall-scrubbing.  How do these things get so gorram dirty...?

Pre-Transplantation I

Well, here we are.  We've been planning our move from Kansas City to Seattle, Washington for over a year now, and it's finally happening next week!  No more sweltering summers or frigid winters buried in snow, all of the fresh seafood I can stand, and beautiful national parks and state forests to explore.

But before all of the rainy days and "too-good-to-be-true-ness," we've got to get there.  We have most everything packed.  I'm pretty sure it will all fit in the car...  We have our apartment nailed down at the deposit in the mail (if it's not already there).  It seems like everything is well in order.

Except it never is...  Moving is one of those things where you think  you've got everything under control until the last minute, and then you realize there were a million things you forgot to do and a lot of people you wanted to see one last time.  I'm at a point now where I constantly feel like I should be doing something to get ready but can never think of anything to do...

So here, friends, is this chronicle of last minute madness and road trip hi-jinks and, hopefully, good things to come.  And for all of you who've been living this move vicariously through us over the last weeks ... there's that, too.

Until the next update!