Flying, flying, flying

Today started early, which we expected.  We woke up about 5:30am.  The shuttle from our hotel left at 7:00 for the airport.  San Francisco was rainy and windy when we left.  Going through the airport is always an experience.  Scott went first and the hot TSA guy gave him the full body pat down.  Then it was my turn.  I walked through the metal detector and put my arms out, waiting for his strong hands to give me the pat down.  He just laughed and told me to keep moving.  A girl can dream can't she.

Five hours and 15 minutes after take-off, we landed on Ohau.  No rain, but it seems the wind has followed us.  It's very windy here today and is expected to be that way for the next couple of days.  We had a couple of hours to kill before we could check-in to our hotel so we stopped by The Queen's Medical Center.  Not only was Scott born here, but Scott's dad was a surgeon on the team that performed the first open-heart surgery in the State of Hawaii in 1959.  We were able to see a few photos from the dedication ceremony of the remodeled cardiac wing of the hospital.  The photos included the other doctor and nurses who participated, as well as the woman who recieved the surgery.  We also found a copy of the newspaper article on a wall in the hospital.

We made our way down to our hotel, changed our clothes, and headed out to the beach.  We are three hours behind from everyone in Oregon.  We are dragging tonight.  The traveling has taken it out of us.  We are trying to stay awake until it at least gets dark.  One good thing, we'll get a head start on everyone else tomorrow morning!

The shuttle dropping us off at the San Francisco airport.

Looks like we are on time to depart.

My first view of Hawaii from the airplane.

Arriving at the Honolulu airport (notice the wind blowing the trees!)

Visiting The Queen's Medical Center

A copy of the newspaper article from Scott's dad's successful heart surgery.

In case your not sure what this picture is....I'm the one on the far left in the purple shirt.  Not sure who the others are, but apparently Scott felt the need to take their picture.

Putting my feet in the ocean on the beach at Waikiki.

Waikiki beach with Diamond Head in the background.

Drive, drive, drive

Today seemed to take forever.  We left early this morning to get to San Francisco.  It was rainy and windy the whole way.  I expected the weather to change the further south we got, but it never did.  We were surprised at how green everything is.  We made it to SF in about 8 hours.  There were a few stops along the way.  We are actually staying in Millbrae, which is outside of SF, closer to the airport.  Not much to do in this town, but my husband knows how to show a girl a good time!  Dinner at the In & Out Burger.  Then a 45 minutes in the hotel gym.  Tomorrow starts early so hopefully we get some sleep tonight.  I think somebody is way too excited to sleep!

Coming into San Francisco

Nothing but the best from my husband!

This poor kid had no idea Scott was even taking his picture.

Priorities

How do you spend the weekend before you leave for a two week trip?  The way any reasonable person would....you go scrapbooking!  I couldn't pass up the opportunity to spend a weekend with my girlfriends scrapbooking.  Now I am running around the house doing laundry and packing so that we are ready to leave in the morning.  I have a feeling that Scott will be chomping at the bit to get going early.

Thanks girls for a great weekend!

Laurie and Heather pretending that I am not taking a picture.  Is there irony in scrapbooking scrapbooking?

My table buddy Cathy.

A Girl's Best Friend

I have the dilemma of what to do after a long winter without any sunshine on these legs. I am not normally this worried, but I have a lot of people asking about if I have been tanning to get ready. No I haven’t been tanning! Hasn’t anyone learned that tanning beds aren’t good for you? I am not willing to risk a future of having my skinned burned off on a regular basis in order to have a good tan for Hawaii.



What’s a girl to do? A quick run to WalMart and problem solved. Just a little something to take the edge off. Much cheaper, much faster, and much safer.

Now, what to do for the 15 minutes I have to walk around naked while it dries?

What to take?????

I never imagined that it would take more than two weeks to pack for two week vacation.  Going from days that may hit the 50's (if we're lucky) to days in the 80's, nights in the 70's.  We got all of our summer clothes out early.  Had to try everything on to make sure it still fit.  Several loads of laundry since everything has been stored away.  Plus, we usually take the car so we can take several bags.  Not this time, can't take the car to Hawaii.  That limits the amount of stuff we can take.

Stacy's clothes nicely stacked, waiting for the suitcase

Scott's clothes thrown all over the bed.  (not going to pack themselves!)

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.