Day Twenty-Three (Home at Last)

We made it!!! Home at last. We had such a great time on our vacation and we are blessed that we got to make this trip together. We had many adventures and have tons of memories. We crossed into 21 states (some more than once), spent 23 days in the car, and stayed at 16 different places (Scott would like me to add that he loaded and unload the car a combination of 32 times!). We also created a fairly long list of places we would like to go back to.



Thanks for coming along on our journey with us! It was fun for us to take pictures along the way to share with everyone. I think it helped us to focus on the day instead of looking forward to what was coming up. This is the last post for the vacation, so I thought I would condense our trip by posting all of the state sign pictures we took along the way. These are in order of how we went, and most were taken from the passenger seat of the car going 50-80 miles an hour.

Day Twenty-Two

Oh, we are almost home. We are enjoying each day, but the light is at the end of the tunnel. There is not a lot to see out here, and what there is, we have already seen. We had plans to see a couple things, but we missed the turnoff to the first one and the second one closed on September 30th.

We stopped and looked at some petroglyphs outside of Thompson Utah. They were really interesting. Some were about 4,000 years old! We then continued on through Utah and ended in Elko Nevada. Anyone familiar with Elko will understand why I don't have much more to say. We can't wait to get home tomorrow to Daisy, Mack, and Lea'ula. We are trying to prepared for the excitment of seeing our pets.

4,000 year old petroglyphs.
These are only about 1,500 years old.

This is how exciting our day was; we took pictures of the Morton's Salt Plant along the Great Salt Lake.

Scott is about done with the driving! He has been a trooper and has driven most of the way.

We are staying at the Elko Red Lion/Resturant/Starbucks/Casino. Here Scott is showing that we won a wopping $28.50. Now we might make it to Lakeview! So much for getting home tomorrow! (Dad - I might need you to wire us some money)

Day Twenty-One

Well, this isn't where I thought we would end up tonight. We had plans, we had everything mapped out, we knew what we were going to do. Mother Nature had other plans. The weather the last couple of days suddenly changed to fall/winter conditions. Last night we lived through the craziest wind storm. Notice I say lived, because I definitly did not sleep through it. Apparently it is always this windy so it didn't faze anyone else. After watching the weather this morning, we decided to check out of our room a day early and drive through the Rocky Mountain National Park and then head West. That was only the first change of plans. We packed up and checked out. We arrived at RMNP to find out that we could only go the first 7 miles of the 48 mile trip across the park. The road was closed due to snow at milepost 7. We made the decision to skip the park and head back towards highway 70.



We had met some people on the train yesterday that said we had to go to Leadville to the ghost towns. We decided to do that instead. Well, low and behold that is at 10,000 feet and due to snow, we scratched that idea too. At the end of the day I looked and pictures and realized that it looks like we would have had a depressing day, but really it turned out pretty good. We are spending the night in Grand Junction, Colorado and tomorrow we will see what a new day brings.

This was as far as we made it into RMNP. The weather was 35 degrees and there was a good chance of snow.
Look....it's snow. Just like the weatherman promised. Actually, the roads weren't too bad and we only had to drive in it for a little while. The next stop on our journey was to see the grave of Buffalo Bill Cody.

After coming down in elevation, we saw the signs of fall. Scott took this picture along the Colorado River.

We pulled over in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and hiked to the pioneer cemetary to find the grave of Doc Holiday.

Kid Curry was also buried at the pioneer cemetary.

Just west of Glenwood Springs is the location of the 1994 Storm King Fire. We stopped at a park to see the memorial. It was very moving to see the stones with each persons picture and history on it.

Looking up at Storm King Mountain.

The memorial statue.

More signs of Fall.