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Saturday, July 01, 2006

 

Back again

This time there was a legitimate reason for the long delay: I did not wish to inform anyone in advance that I would be out of town.
On Monday, June 12, I had some repair work done on the exhaust system of my car and did not get out of town until 5:00 p/m. (no, I don't believe in going on a 3,000 mile trip with a broken exhaust pipe: that's a recipe for Carbon monoxide poisoning.
I only made it to the West Virginia- Virginia border. Tuesday I spent driving across the rest of Virginia and Tennessee, and made it about 100 miles from Memphis before calling an early night. Wednesday I took far too long to find a park where I could take some decent pictures of the Mississippi River, then spend the afternoon playing leapfrog with Freeway elephants all the way across Arkansas, then made it through Dallas and Fort Worth just after rush hour with the sun glaring in my eyes. Thursday I stopped at the museum in Pecos, then rushed across the rest of Texas and watched oil pumps working halfway across the state before I got into the western desert parts, zoomed through New Mexico, and crossed into southeast Arizona, to visit a relative. I took some pictures of the town where I grew up, and went into Phoenix to spend Saturday and Sunday visiting my family. I was instantly reminded of why I left Phoenix when I encountered 6 lanes of traffic on the freeway at a dead stop at 2:30 in the faternoon when it's over 95 degrees outside. It didn't get much better the entire weekend, and I was glad to get out of there, in spite of the fact that the visit with my family was, to me, very successful.
Monday I drove up to Utah, Tuesday picked up my teenaged son to come out east with me for six weeks and visited an uncle and another brother, and Wednesday began heading back. We visited a living history site at This Is The Place monument in Salt Lake City, then drove up and got into Wyoming. Thursday, we visited Fort Bridger, then a couple of sites on the Mormon Trail in Wyoming, and took a long-range look at Independence Rock, and stayed at an RV campground just outside Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. Friday we stopped at Chimney Rock, briefly, and went to see my brother in Nebraska. We stayed there two nights and I spend most of the day packing stuff I had left behind there in order to ship it to Morgantown. There was too much and it's going to be too expensive to mail, so I confined myself to organizing the most urgent of it.
Sunday I decided to forego church, but we did visit the Mormon Trail visitor's center at the Winter Quarters site in Omaha, then the Kanesville site in Council Bluffs, took a quick peek at Glenwood, and made it to a state part just outside of Missouri. Monday we toured some of the Mormon sites in Missouri, and made it to Hannibal, where we found another RV campground. Tuesday we visited Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois, and found another park just ouside Macomb. Wednesday was supposed to be a mad dash across the rest of the country, and we made it across the rest of Illinois, all of Indiana, and nearly to Columbus when the alternator on the car died. Fortunately, due to the hospitality of friends of my Significant Other, we were able to make repairs and stay the night, and returned to Morgantown about 3:30 PM, with time to unpack and do laundry. Yesterday, we did some shopping and I made it to a dentist's appointment, today is Library day, with catching up of stuff that piled up while I was traveling.
I'll have more oddservations the next time I'm on-line. Suffice it to say that I've spent most of the past two weeks sitting in the car going 500+ miles per day and while it's much faster than walking, no form of long-distance travel is really on my list of favorite things to do.

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