Beginning at the End

I know...it's about time. Right?

We took an extended road trip during the latter part of September and early part of October, and it's taken me awhile to get back into blogging since our return. We were on the road for 24 days and covered a lot of territory...probably more than we should have tried to do in that length of time. Our minivan accrued roughly eight thousand miles during those 24 days.

Anyway, I'm back now, and I thought I'd share a bit about our trip. Ha! A bit? You're going to get it all, you know, just not all at once.

You're welcome.

Our travels took us through part of Colorado, and I've already shared some of that in my post about Rifle Falls. From there, we went to Utah, where we visited four national parks plus the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Next was the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. And then we went on out to California to visit Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, wrapping up our our vacation with a visit to Yosemite National Park.

I thought I'd begin at the ending with my blog posts, telling you about our trip home. You see, we had traveled through a lot of desert in Utah, Arizona, and California; and Doug really didn't want to drive through the desert again on our way home. So we decided to come home on I-80, through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois.

Well, winter came early on Highway 80. It had begun snowing while we were in Yosemite. That should have been a clue to head south. But we didn't. We wound up driving in snow for three days. On the third day, between Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming, it got so bad that traffic on I-80 slowed to about 30 miles per hour. So we made the decision to get off that highway at Cheyenne and drop south to I-70. That was a good move. Within fifteen or twenty minutes, we were out of snow and into rain. And it wasn't too long until even the rain cleared up.

Here are a few photos from that three days in the snow. I figured, if I waited and posted them in a couple of months, the snow wouldn't impress anyone.

In Nevada, the snow wasn't accumulating on the roadway...just on the mountains.

At a rest stop in Wyoming, a trucker scrapes the ice and snow from the grille of his truck.

A group of antelope in the snow alongside the highway, with a big snow fence in the background.

The view out our windshield before we turned south at Cheyenne.

We were talking with a friend this week, who was thinking about taking a trip out West. He asked if we had any recommendations to share with him. Doug said, "Yes. FLY!"