Young Oldie: May 2012

I promised I would take more pictures this trip, and I did. Without more ado:

Here we are, leaving Texas. We were sort of excited. We hadn't figured out that we were going to be confined to these carseats for three days in a row.

He pretty much hates the carseat always, but likes having his picture taken.

This is how the adults pack up.

"What on earth are you doing, Mama?"

This is how the kids help pack up. You'll notice the Wii controller and the jammies at 10am.

It was imperative we pack enough hats.

And trucks.

This is our first hotel room, the one in Texas. We stayed here for hours and hours and hours while the movers loaded all our stuff into the truck. Then it was lunchtime and we took lunch to Daddy, and sat in the car and the backyard for hours and hours and hours more while the movers finished up.

We pretty much hate hotel rooms, because of the No Jumping and No Stomping rules (we were usually on the second or third floor).

However, some of us can sleep anywhere.

Sorry, forgot to rotate the image. But this would the the superhero stance.

And this would be a minor illustration of why it's not easy to be with three little kids in a hotel room for six hours.

Here we are, blurrily discovering our new coloring books. Which wound up ALL over the car before the trip progressed. I'm not sure what I was thinking, handing them eight markers each (washable); I guess I was believing the label on the books that said "Great for Travel!" It was a lie.

Eating chicken nuggets and posing.

The second hotel room, a sad Super-8 in Kansas. It was clean and we slept fine, but the beige. Oh man, such a lot of beige. Sort of fit in with the rest of Kansas, actually.

See? This is the beginning of Kansas.

Some windmills. From miles away.

More windmills.

Another windmill.

This is more of Kansas...four hours after I took the first picture. I have nothing but respect for the people who live there and all the wonderful food and stuff that comes out of Kansas but it is a bit repetitive to drive through.

We were so glad to see this sign. (I forgot to take a picture of the Colorado sign.)

And we were kind of humorously appalled to see this sign.

Red dirt! A hill of some sort!

Red rocks! It was starting to feel like home.

Mountains in the distance! (We actually took a picture of what turned out to be a cloudy horizon, because we so wanted to see mountains that we hallucinated the clouds as mountains. Yep, we were that desperate.)

And there were some cool rocks...

(Getting closer to Utah now.)

If anyone who reads my novels wonders what the Reva, the great (imaginary) desert where the (imaginary) Kadishim live looks like, it's this.

Just like this. But without the asphalt, obviously.

Here is the Vast Empty of the second half of Wyoming. One of those places where the sign says "Rest area: 1 mile. Next rest area: 84 miles."

And snow fence. I took a picture of it for those of you who didn't know such things exist. The purpose is for the slats of the fence to stop the high winds of a blizzard from drifting snow over the road and making it impassible.

Some Wyoming mountains. We were sighing with happiness about every twenty minutes by this point, and the kids got very impatient with us for saying "come on, guys, quit fighting over the shark and look at the mountains!" They were like, we've seen the dang mountains. Make my brother give back the shark!

More Wyoming, mesas. (More Kadishi desert, if you must know.)

(See the snow fence? A desert with blizzards. That's the way we roll.)

Pretty much I just love mesas, and Miss Boo liked this mountains because they were pink. Obviously, God made the dirt that color precisely for her. (Well, who's to say He didn't?)

In my defense, the Husband kept saying "You should take a picture of THAT! We're going to be passing it in just a minute!"

I should mention, the Empty is not illusory. There are very few (very small) towns in this area. Those who are worried about overpopulation should really drive through Wyoming and Utah and Nevada.

The coloring books are still going strong, although their magic had begun to wear thin by day 3.

Luckily we got some kid's meal toys at one of our numerous fast-food lunches that the Littlest Sasquatch approved of. He was tired of his carseat by the end of day 1. (The Husband said, "it's not as bad as moving to Texas, where he would scream every time you put him in his seat and then you would cry for twenty minutes." I concur. It was not that bad.)

See? We were sane and happy, mostly.

A neat Utah rock that the Husband made me take a picture of.

More Utah rocks.

Yes, the road was really that curvy. People did not take it at 50mph, even though they should have.

(Can't you just imagine whole cities living in those cliffs, plotting?)

Well, some of us can.

You can't see it so well, but these red rocks were pocked with caves, some of them big enough for a Volkswagen.

And of course, they just looked amazing. (Alas, I had to take all these shots through the car window.)

See what I mean about the cave? (Me: Come on, guys, look at the caves! Animals could live in there! Miss Boo: Mama, bats live in caves. Me: Yes. Her: why do they do that? Me: because the light hurts their eyes, they sleep during the day and come out at night to eat bugs. Her: they shouldn't.)

More cool Utah rocks.

A river! (Or a reservoir. I can't remember which. We were just excited to see, in the distance, some snowcaps.)

Some of you will recognize that we were almost to Salt Lake. I didn't take many pictures of Salt Lake, because the Husband needed me in my capacity as navigator and Queen of the Atlas.

Again, if you are worried about overpopulation, this is only ten minutes from a city that was big enough to host the Olympics.

Pretty, ain't it?

I think this shot was an accident, but you can see by the reflection that I was being Queen of the Atlas.

Just to show you how steep the roads are. That ramp, for those of you not familiar with mountain driving, is in case a big semi truck abruptly has his breaks burn out. It's an uphill ramp where (hopefully) he can get stopped, instead of continuing to speed up all the way down the mountain and crashing into traffic/buildings/pedestrians/cattle.

This is the beginning of the Great Salt Desert. That white stuff is not snow.

And this is *our* mountains, in Nevada, the Rubies. Pretty, aren't they?

(At the end of the trip my purse contained two boxes of crayons, two dinosaurs, two snakes, and a set of Star Wars Legos. Along with our hotel reservations, some peppermints, our money, and the camera.)

Our mountains again--this is cresting the hill between "town" and the little settlement (one hesitates to call it a town, although it does have a post office, two bars, and some churches built out of sheet metal) where we live.

On the road to my house.

A park! Huzzah! No more carseats!

Thank goodness for the park, since Mama and Daddy were coming down with a wicked head cold by day 4, and we didn't have the resources to chase the kids through any sort of indoor entertainment. They got their jitters out admirably.

We bounced from slide to slide like ping-pong balls.

And rocked on the animal-bouncy thing, while Mama coughed and Daddy wondered whether he had a fever. (He did.)

Then we went back out to our new house, so as to see it in the daylight. The day before (the day we rolled into town) we'd gone in the twilight, because the Husband was desperate to know if I hated it. (I did not.)

This is the view from my front porch. (How could I hate it? I would live in a shack for such a view, and this is not a shack.)

See? Hardly shacklike. The kids settled down, as soon as the furniture/stuff arrived, and played Wii while the Husband and I unpacked like mad fiends. It is, I have discovered, possible to unpack an entire kitchen in a day if the packers neglected to label which box the pots and pans were in and you need to cook dinner.

Here is what the mountains looked like on Sunday, with lowering clouds obscuring part of their height.

Isn't it neat how the little canyon between the two stayed green, while they were covered with snow? I thought it was, anyway.

This is my reflection in the front window as I took a picture of Miss Boo getting very involved in playing Lego Star Wars for the Wii. She jumps when she wants the avatar to jump, and doesn't quite get why that doesn't always work.