California

(Gabriella and Mikey)

We decided that the road to Albuquerque should be by way of Taos , as there were some Indian ruins there, and why not see some more ruins? So we got off the interstate at Raton , New Mexico , and headed west into the mountains. It turns out that this was the most mountainous part of our journey, and the van did just fine. It was a really pretty drive, past Philmont Scout Ranch, where Nate went backpacking in high school, and past a few small towns around ski resorts. The mountain roads were really windy though, and we found out that Ella gets car sick on those kind of roads, so we had to pull over a couple of times so she could recover. We got into Taos about 6:30 and found that the ruins had been closed for the night. So we saw what we could through the gate, which was not much, and went to find dinner. There were a bunch of snooty looking places that were really expensive, but after a lot of walking we found a Mexican place with delicious food.

We left Taos around 8:30 and got to Albuquerque around 10:30 , with no more car sickness. Ella said she was sick once, but it seems she figured out that being sick means we stop driving and get out, so we didn’t fall for that one. We stayed at a La Quinta in Albuquerque that we got with credit card points. Ella slept in Nate’s bed and this time both beds were good. After a disappointing continental breakfast, we hit the road around 11:15 , possibly our earliest departure so far.

It was a huge driving day, so we wanted to get a good start. We drove through New Mexico and Arizona to Gilbert, just outside of Pheonix. It was a beautiful drive, with lots of mountains and huge cacti. We had a quick McDonalds lunch, wherein Ella managed to totally bite it running around, cutting her knees and bashing her head. Shelley was super worried that Ella had a concussion and kept asking if she recognized us both, and if she remembered her name, long after Ella had forgotten that she even fell. The portable DVD player was a great friend for the drive, and we played lots of hide and seek. We pulled into our penultimate destination Nate’s cousin John and Shannon’s house around 7:00 pacific time, then went to dinner with them and their little baby Mikey. We tried to go to T.G.I.Fridays, but they weren’t open yet. The area John and Shannon live in is growing a ton, and everything is so new you can’t really tell if things are open yet or not. Chili’s, being open, provided an excellent alternative. Ella was so tired during the meal that she fell asleep leaning on Nate’s lap about halfway through.

We woke up the next morning to have an excellent breakfast cooked by Shannon for us, and then tried to figure out what to do. The temperatures were in the high nineties for our stay in Pheonix, so we didn’t want to be outside too much. We decided to try and take Ella to the movies, and found a second run theater with Happy Feet still playing. Shelley’s friend Jenny met us there. John and Shannon had only been in their house for two weeks, so they stayed at home and cleaned up their garage. Ella was a giant scaredy cat for the first part of the movie. The previews were really loud and that scared her, and then the movie itself scared her. She did like it a lot though, when the penguins sung and danced. She did pretty well, but by the last half hour or so, she was just playing around and climbing all over the seats and Nate. We also got our first of what will surely be many In-N-Out burgers and grilled cheeses, much to the delight of Shelley.

That night, it being St. Patrick’s Day, Shannon cooked a huge meal of corned beef and cabbage, which was really great. We wound up the evening by playing Trivial Pursuit, which John and Shannon won, but we gave them some decent competition. The next day, our hosts had plans for a barbeque, so we went to hand out with Jenny again. She is living in Tempe and working for Campus Crusade at ASU. She loves it in Pheonix, and took us to one of her favorite stores, Rancho Market, which is a really cool Mexican market, with all sorts of fresh produce, meats, cheese, juices, all sorts of good stuff. We grabbed all the stuff we needed to make a dinner that night, and then went to Jenny’s apartment complex, which has a pool. We swam and layed around for about an hour or so, and then we went back to John and Shannon ’s where we cooked up beans and taquitos. The next morning we said our goodbyes and left for California around 10:00 or so. We were finishing up our trip, and it turned out that Shelley drove the entire time, with only a quick stop for gas and some food before we crossed into California . Jenny had warned us to fill up on gas before leaving Arizona , and it was a good thing she did because the price jumped a little over sixty cents just across the border.

We got to Shelley’s mother’s house in Valencia California after 15 days and 2987 miles. We were kind of sad we didn’t get to 3000 miles, but were too tired to drive around the extra 13 miles. We’ve been here a week our so already, but we’ll discuss that later.

(Jasmine, Jayana, Joel and Gabriella)

As it turns out, we stayed in neither Hayes nor Oakley. When we got into Oakley, which is where US 40 splits off from I-70 towards Colorado Springs, Ella was doing super well riding, we both felt good, and there were still a couple hours of sunlight left. So we decided to power on to Colorado Springs. We stopped in a little town at a grocery store and got some carrots and ranch dip, some cheese and crackers, and made that our dinner. Our bellies full, we set off for Colorado Springs.

The road was super bumpy and hilly, but we were making good time. The only problem was that we were going to arrive in CS at about 11:30 and we had no place to stay. We didn’t want to bother Shelley’s family that was there, because we had told them we wouldn’t be arriving until the next day, Tuesday. We also didn’t have any cell phone service for the first part of our trip. But once we crossed into Colorado, even though it was still rural and we were near nothing, we got full service, and called Nate’s parents, and had them book us a room online. With that taken care of we arrived as planned and crashed out in the hotel. Shelley ever so kindly gave Nate the bed with the huge dip in the middle, and slept with Ella in the good bed.

We awoke to a beautiful sunny morning in Colorado Springs, and had a decent continental breakfast. We were out of the hotel around noon, and went to The Garden of the Gods, which is a beautiful park with cool red rock formations. While at the visitor center there, we picked up some brochures for other stuff to do in the area, one of which was some Anasazi cliff houses, which looked pretty cool and not too far away, so we headed over towards them. Unfortunately when we got there, there was an $8.50 per person charge. We were able to snap a couple pictures as we pulled around though, so we totally stuck it to them.

Because we didn’t know when we would meet up with Shelley’s family, we walked around ‘Historic Colorado City’ a little neighborhood of Colorado Springs. We found a nice little deli and had delicious bagel sandwiches. While we were leaving we heard from Shelley’s Aunt and Uncle(Joel and Marcia), so we drove off to their house. Joel and Marcia made us a delicious dinner and cousin Nicki came over with two of her three kids, Jasmine and Jayana. Poor Joel had to stay home because he just had his tonsil removed. We stayed up chatting and catching up. We were planning on leaving the next day, but decided to stay one more day. We spent Wednesday doing laundry and catching up on sleep and then went over to Nicki’s house. Nate finally got to meet Jason and Joel, that makes it official that Nate has met all of Shelley’s family (at least all the family she has met). We ended up staying at Nicki’s for dinner and didn’t get out of there till late.

We had planned on getting up early to see Joel and Marcia one more time before we headed off, but not as early as Ella had in mind. Around 5:20am on Thursday morning we hear Ella yelling mommy turn the light on, turn on the light, we both thought her voice sounded muffled, kind of like she was under our bed. As Nate was turning on the light Shelley got down to find Ella and sure enough only her feet were visible, she was under the bed yelling for us. It was pretty hysterical, and she wasn’t even scarred.

We said our good byes to Uncle Joel and Aunt Marcia, and took a little nap, we were out of there house around noon and stopped by to see Nicki one more time. After a lunch of yummy pizza at Nicki’s we were off to Albuquerque.

Going to Kansas City, Kansas City here we come

(Leslie & Ella)

Well here we are still in Kansas; we liked it so much we decided to stay. Our next two days are going to be pretty much driving straight for long periods of time and it was such a beautiful day today that we decided to hang out here for a bit. It also was really helpful that our hosts here were very accommodating and the conversation was great. But before we go there (Kansas that is) we will update you a little more on our journeys here.

When we last left off we had spent our night with some good friends (Leslie and Tebogo) in St. Louis. On Saturday morning those friends had some classes to teach at a juvenile detention center(pretty dang cool if you ask me, they actually teach Capoeira, dance and geography every weekend at this center,) so we stayed at there house and got cleaned up while they taught. After there classes were over we decided to meet at this great little café in St. Louis called Cummel for Saturday brunch. If you arrive before noon on Saturdays they have a $5 brunch, all you can eat buffet, it was so good and they people at the café were so friendly and fun. It was an eccentric place with tables straight out of the 50’s and colors to excite anyone’s eyes. The tables didn’t match and the chairs were all from different sets, and they had a little stage at the front with a play table and chairs that Ella loved.

We left St. Louis behind that afternoon and started our drive to Kansas City. And then we ended our drive to Kansas City four uneventful hours later. We have been staying Shelley’s friend Abbey’s parents, Judy and R.C. Masonbrink, who have been wonderful. They had plans for Saturday night, so we went to Panera and posted our entry from yesterday. Today has been fun, with a late morning and a light breakfast, and then the three of us walked down to a nearby park, and met Abbey’s sister Leah, and talked with her for a while as Ella played on the playground. She started off scared of most of the equipment, but by the end she was climbing up the little climbing wall like a pro.

After the playground we went back to the Masonbrinks and fixed our car. Nothing was wrong, seriously, but the back brake light/turn signal was out. We actually got pulled over the night before because of it. Shelley was driving, but for some reason the officer wanted her ID and mine, which was odd. He let us go with no problems, though, so we didn’t make too big a deal about it. When the car was all better, we went off for some K.C. BBQ at a place called RJ’s and had some great food. Shelley got by on fried cauliflower and corn fritters, which she like a lot. Ella had some chicken and then fell asleep at the table while we all talked. We stuffed her into the car and then went on a driving tour of Kansas City, seeing some cool houses, like the Appleby mansion, George Brett’s mansion, and the huge houses of several other big names that escape me at the moment. We also went into a really cool modern art museum which had these neat visual installations. We arrived home safely and then spent the rest of the day talking, and hiding Woof-Woof (Ella’s favorite stuffed animal) for Ella to find.

We plan on taking it easy tomorrow morning, and then hitting up another BBQ joint for Nate and a cool vegetarian place for Shelley for lunch, and then driving out towards Colorado. We’ll probably end up staying in either Hays or Oakley Kansas.

Westward Ho!

(Ella excited about mountains)

(Monks Mound)

(View of other mounds from Monks Mound)

(What the ancient Cahokians saw from Monks Mound)

While in Champaign, we decided we had too much stuff and shipped 3 Rubbermaid totes off to California. Even with those 130 pounds gone, the car is still low, but not as low. We even have a wee glimpse of our back window, which we didn’t have before. Champaign is one of our favorite places, and it was great to be able to hang out with Katie and her boyfriend Tebbin, and to take a couple more classes with C.M. Denis again. We didn’t get to see everyone we wanted to see, but it was good none the less.

From Champaign we did our first bit of true westering, 40 miles to Clinton Illinois, to see Shelley’s Grandparents. We went out to dinner with them and Shelley’s aunts Julie and Lisa. We emptied the car again, and did what is hopefully a final repack. We have most of what we need in easy reach, and only a few bags that we need to take out at each stop, instead of every bag, like we did in Champaign and Clinton. We ended up renting Nanny McPhee, which was pretty funny.

On Thursday evening did a little backtracking to Bloomington, where we saw Shelley’s cousin Kylie and her husband Ryan, and their children Devin, Ashlyn, Madelyn and their newborn Kaitlyn. We had dinner with them and hung out for a while, and then went to see Nate’s friend Andrew Hanna, who is finishing up his last year at ISU. Nate picked up a couple more books and a CD to make up for what we mailed off to California, which Shelley was not quite okay with.

Friday afternoon we hit the road for St. Louis. After driving an hour outside of Clinton we realized we forgot quite a few really important things, like saying goodbye to Shelley’s aunts, we are the worst niece and nephew ever but after calling and talking to them, Shelley was ok with not turning around to go say goodbye. After 500 miles we’ve finally left our comfort zone. We’ve been to Champaign, Clinton and Bloomington so often that it just felt like another weekend trip, but now we’re truly off.

Our first stop along the way to St. Louis was Cahokia Mounds, we arrived around 3 pm. At first glace the mounds just make you want to laugh, it is huge piles of dirt, I mean huge. One mound called Monks Mound was 100 feet high and covered 14 acres, it was two tiered. We went to the interpretive center and learned a lot of interesting facts, it made you respect what you saw more and not just want to laugh that you drove all that way to see piles of dirt. Ella was not too thrilled about the interpretive center and the 15 min. factual movies “scared her,” those are her own words. We got her to be good while we looked at the exhibits by telling her we could climb the “big mountain”(Monks Mound) if she was good. By the time we were ready to climb the mountain, it was raining but you try to explain to a two year old we can’t do the one thing she has been looking forward to, so we climb the “mountain” in the rain. And when I say we, it was Nate and I climbing taking turns holding Ella in the sling. Nate would like to educate you all on the mounds so here is his spiel on the mounds. Cahokia is the largest archaeological site north of Mexico, and was the major center of the Mississippian civilization from 900-1200. It is also a United Nations World Heritage Site, so you should all go see it. Go to http://www.cahokiamounds.com/cahokia.html for more information.

Oh yeah on our way to the mounds we made a quick detour to see the worlds largest catsup bottle. It was quite a disappointment, it is a water tower shaped like a catsup bottle (way lame), because of this detour and the disappointment, Ella no longer likes catsup. She kept saying “I don’t wanna get catsup, I don’t like catsup” and crying. It was pretty sad.

Before we even left Naperville, Shelley was convinced that the car would be able to make it, just not necessarily in one piece. She figured we would loose a door or some other part on the road. And so, as we were going to Monks Mound to climb it, we put Ella in her car seat and Nate tried to close the door, and it got stuck almost all the way closed. Shelley had jinxed us. The back was open about a half inch, but the front of the door was latched, so we couldn’t close it or open it. Needless to say, we kind of panicked, and we sat there in the rain for a while trying to fix it. We finally went to a gas station, and tried some more. Finally, we got sick of it and just started hitting the door trying to close it. Shelley finally gave it a good smack with her hips, and that jarred it enough so we could open and close it. So now we have to be extra careful and gentle closing the door. It will hold up but we just have to close it from the back now, we can’t pull it closed like you normally do for a mini-van. But after that episode we hit up Monk’s Mound. Once we get our camera figured out, we’ll put up pictures from Cahokia.

After we left, we headed into St. Louis proper, leaving Illinois behind for a good long time. After a small bout of car sickness with Ella, we met up with Tebogo, Nate’s friend from Capoeira, and Nate took his class that night. Tebogo and his girlfriend Leslie put us up in their fabulous, spacious, amazing, third floor apartment, and we stayed up late eating pizza, drinking beer and talking.

Our wifi spot, Panera in Kansas City, has been closed for half an hour now, and we should probably be heading out. We shall try our best to post more tomorrow, especially pictures.

Eastward bound

(Ella with her toys)

So we began our trip in the wrong direction, yesterday we traveled the state of Indiana. This is only after we hit up Naperville one more time to finish off the last of our packing, which we hoped would last about an hour maybe two and ended up being three. It also didn't help that our departure fromLibertyville was planned for 7am and we didn't get off till 8 or 8:30. Our van is packed to the gills, with just enough room for the three of us to fit. The back is riding super low, but it didn't give us any problems on the drive. Shelley was white knuckled the whole time she was driving from Naperville to Dyer and from Dyer to Plainfield.

We went to Dyer to see Tara and John and their family, Nate's cousins. Ella had a blast playing with Samantha and Alex and boy is Jack ever cute. It was really great to get see them one last time before we headed out west. After arriving there 2 hours late we left there about another 2 hours late to head toPlainfield, a suburb of Indianapolis, to visit Didi and Wes and their family (also seriously cute kids). Dinner there was great but we felt bad we didn't arrive till eight so we all had a really late dinner, sorry about that. Although we aren't on a strict schedule we hate to think we areinconveniencing others. From here on out though, we have no strict times or really even dates set up with people, so we can take our time, or not, as the situation dictates.
We got into Champaign at 11:00, and pretty much crashed immediately. Katie(Nate's sis) has given us her room to stay in while we are here. Unfortunately, Ella decided that she really really wanted apple juice this morning at 5:00, and was screaming and crying hysterically for a long time. Of course we had left all her stuff in the car, and neither of us wanted to go out into the freezing cold to get her asippy cup. We got her calmed down though, and Nate did end up going out to get the sippy cup after all.
And so today, the 5th of March, we've been napping, and trying to repack the car, so that it is more organized and a better use of space. Tonight I'll be going to Capoeira, and Shelley, Ella and Katie will be making a big mashed potato and green bean casserole feast. Our "semi plans" will be keeping us here until Wednesday. Well we better get back to packing and visiting.

The Beginning

Yesterday was the officially the end and today is our beginning. We are beginning a new life, the life of vagabonds. As the saying goes "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry," and on the first day of our journey we are living the saying to a T. We attempted to pack up all our possessions in a matter of two days and were unsuccessful. Therefore our trip is now slightly delayed, instead of beginning our journey from Libertyville we are going to begin from Naperville. We have to go back there and pack up the rest of our possessions. Hopefully we can get the rest of all of our stuff into the van. If not, its off to Goodwill or the dumpster. We had an excellent going away party in Libertyville, with snacks and pizza and watching Blast from the Past, and then Parent Trap, the new one. We also took Ella to the late night clinic to make sure she didn't have an ear infection, which she didn't. So we're all set to wake up early, have breakfast and go finish packing.