We left Iowa in the evening after the movers had gone and we'd handed off the rest of the stuff that wasn't coming with us, secured the things that didn't make it onto the truck but would be picked up the following week, and we'd torn Ian away from his girlfriend amid tears and much unhappiness.
We thought it was going to be a long, hot trip, but turns out it was a long, hot, boring trip. We drove through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. It wasn't until New Mexico that we started to see some beautiful country. The rest of those states? Pretty much flat, dry, and boring.
Sometimes hella smelly too. We passed the biggest feed lot we have ever seen... or smelled, and we've seen/smelled a few of those things in our travels.This picture only shows a portion of the lot. If you look closely you can see that it stretches all the way back to the horizon. It also stretched for about 5 miles alongside the highway. Friggin' big lot.
Of course, the boys and I were in the car with air conditioning and all had our iPods, etc to keep us busy. Alec was in the truck with the cat, assorted plants making the move with us, and other essentials that couldn't go in the mover's truck.
Bad enough he had no air conditioning but he also had the cat. The cat who barely made the 3 day trip from Montana to Iowa intact (physically and mentally) and who now had to make another 3 day trip in the kennel. His yowling starts very low in h
is throat but by the time it releases from his mouth it's a pretty amazing sound. And very annoying, especially for hundreds of miles. Jake could rival one of Pavarotti's tenor friends in projection, only I think he's tone deaf.
Mac kept himself occupied in the back seat and Ian did a lot of sleeping.
We stayed each night in a different hotel in a different state and found it interesting how... uh, different they all were. Shopping in stores for water and snacks was a kicker too. We stayed off the major highways and cut through each state on smaller interstate or local highways. So these were primarily small towns we traveled through, with small stores and not much variety, and they shut down fairly early in the evening.
One night in New Mexico, we asked about an authentic Mexican restaurant and had dinner there. It was located in a part of town with a ratio of 0 caucasions to every Hispanic. The people in the restaurant were very suprised to see an obviously non-Hispanic family come into the place, but they served us and practiced their English while we practiced our Spanish.
The food was great and we got to watch the Spanish "stories" throughout dinner, while also enduring the stares from other patrons as they came in and got an eyeful of the interlopers. Sometimes it's good to experience being the minority.
We passed the VLA or Very Large Array they used in the movie Contact with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey (good movie btw) but everyone was too road weary to make the stop to check it out in person.This is just a small view of the array. There are 27 dishes out there so this is not quite half of them. Then there's the big station with the biggest dish out there.
This is wha
t it looks like when you're too tired to even drink your beer and this is what it looks like when you've driven 400-500 miles in a day and are too tired to think about eating let alone get up and do it.
As we entered the desert the terrain changed and started breaking up with much more picturesque views.
We saw the storms you see in the desert; solitary and self-contained in appearance (even though they can stretch for miles) with lots of finger and sheet lightening as well as rain.
We stopped at the Continental Divide and Ian serenaded us with the song he'd
been writing for his girlfriend while Mac did the SpongeBob dance.
Not long after we crossed into Arizona we got hit with one of those storms, which cooled things off considerably, and as soon as that passed we saw what was to become our new home.
P.S. It's much easier to take pictures while driving than I thought. ;)
