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...