Friday, June 16th: Utah

I have to admit, yesterday morning got to me.  The stupid tires, another day of constant stops and repairs, the broken fridge, and it felt like we were crawling through endless miles and continued to miss our destinations.  I definitely had thought “What the heck were we thinking?”  “Who in their right mind does this kind of thing with 7 children??”  “If we can’t make it through KS on paved roads, how on earth are we going to get through the Alaska highway?”  “We are idiots.”

A shower and a good night of sleep brightens your perspective quite a bit. No one died.  We’re all still together.  Thankfully, the tires did not cause something catastrophic.  And Colorado is beautiful. 

Tim did a good job of reminding me of all the good things AND he managed to fix the fridge :)  and the tires :).  He tends to be the more positive of the two of us.  He is the dreamer, I’m the realist.  I dash his dreams quite consistently.  But if I’m on board, I’m the stubborn one who doesn’t let it go. lol. It has worked for us for almost 20 years now (wow).

In case you didn’t know, we spent our honeymoon in Alaska way back in 2003 when dinosaurs roamed the earth and TV was still in black and white, as Hannah likes to describe it.  We loved Homer, AK so much that, when Tim lost his job the following year and I graduated from college, we decided to drive up and spend a few years up here.  We just left.  No jobs.  No money. Back in the day when you used maps instead of GPS.  (I feel old).  We got our jobs on the Mississippi riverside for a small, fly-in village named Seldovia - he as the sole Math/Science teacher for the middle and high school, and I as an itinerant Special Ed. teacher for three fly-in village schools. A few years of adventure and then come back east to start a family… until we got pregnant with Abbey a few months later and ended up staying for 8 years.  Those were the Golden Years of our marriage.  We loved the community we built and the people we made our family away from family.  But I constantly struggled with being so far from family while my children grew up without them.

Even though we’re both from NY, my family had relocated to Charlotte, NC during our time in Alaska. So, we hit the Al-Can (Alaska-Canadian Hwy) again with a trailer and 4 kids 6 months old and up.  We spent a month on the road and suffered a ridiculous set back that has a really cool ending.  That story is for another day.  Or you can read my blog from years ago if you’re interested.  What happened convinced us that we were making the right choice but it still didn’t make it easy.  Charlotte was THE WORST place I have ever lived.  And I’ve lived in a lot of places.  The only good thing were some of the lovely people we met during our three years there until we decided we needed mountains and space again and relocated to Mars Hill, just outside of my birthplace, Asheville, NC.

But we always talked about going back.  To share with our kids some of our adventures along the way, make some new ones and to introduce them to the special place we spent the first years of our life together as a family.  Our church family was incredible and was our life support.  I can’t wait to reconnect with them.  The place we lived on the edge of the wilderness with no grocery store unless you took a boat or a plane, was an experience I want them to experience too.

Today we made it to something fun.

Our plan was Rocky Mountain National Park as the first stop but with all of our delays, on top of it RMNP was undergoing major construction that was causing long lines to get into the park.  AND they require a timed entry permit to get it, which, if you miss your time, you then have to wait until after 2pm to wait in another line to get into the park.  And there are recommendations like “make sure you get to this hike before 11 to avoid large crowds” …  Not our idea of an outdoor adventure.  But we were sad not to spend more time in CO.  The scenery we drove through was gorgeous.

So on to Utah!  We spent a few hours at Dinosaur National Monument.  Back in 1909 Pittsburgh discovered 7 intact dinosaur spines and loads of bones.  They excavated large intact skeletons which are now displayed all over the US and then enclosed the remaining hillside of bones into a building where you can now view them.  It was pretty impressive and it was fun to see even the older, less excited kids realize that it was a very cool site.

Tonight we hope to get a few hours west of Salt Lake City so we can get an earlier set up a Lassen National Park in California!  It’s a little breakneck, but unfortnuately that is our pace when your destination is 5000 miles away!