Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The long, long car trip

I've been referring to this trip as the "car"-vation.  Boy, howdy, it was a long one.  Not so much in time; we did it in 8 days but the miles and miles and miles.  Wowzer!
You're getting the condensed version.
First stop was Boonville, MO.  Peter's alma mater, Kemper Military School.  This is where we met all those many years ago.  It is no longer being used although some of the buildings had something going on in them.


Here's Peter outside his old barracks/dorm.


Next stop - the Rockies.


They're hard to capture - at least for me they were.  They go on for ever and ever.


I'm hungry - let's eat!



Here comes our first national park - Arches.


After Arches we headed to Bryce.  There were hundreds (that's what it felt like anyway) of miles in between these two parks with ab-so-lute-ly nothing to see but mountains and more mountains.  It was daunting.



The plan was to see Zion the next day but we decided to broom it and chose . . .



Yes, he's still there - on every street corner.

We didn't even gamble!  We were busy walking, walking and walking.  And it was hot.  My favorite part of Vegas was the musical fountain (after dark) at the Bellagio.  I got teary-eyed.






And now, the reason we went west.  The "big hole."  The Grand Canyon.




 Peter took all these pictures.  Turns out you really need to walk to the edge for the good shots and turns out I just could not do that.  I tried, I really did but it was a "no go" for me.



That brown strip in the middle of the photo is the Colorado River.  Gives you a little perspective.

This was a "once in a lifetime" trip for us.  For one thing, neither one of us ever wants to spend that much time in a car again. Long days and a different motel every night just isn't our thing.

I'm glad we went.  We saw incredible sights.  Mother Nature at her best (except for the whole Elvis thing) and we can now cross it off our bucket list.





5 comments:

  1. My goodness! Eight days? What were you thinking? The pictures are awesome! That's exactly the way my husband likes to travel...we barely stop and we're off again.

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    1. We can't seem to help ourselves but in our defense, there's really nothing to see between all those points.
      We don't hike and we don't gamble/drink.
      And there was nothing between Amarillo and home; not for us anyway.

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  2. I can't believe you are home already. It looks great--but yeah, that's a lot of car time. Ick. We may have to do our "lifetime" version in the next couple of years. Thankfully we have family/friends dotted here and there that we can spend a couple days with at a time, break it up a bit. Lucky them. : )

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  3. That was one crazy long drive, but by the looks of it worth it!
    What a scenery, breathe taking!

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    1. It was worth it, Astrid. Even more so because I know I'll never do it again!

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