Tripping Out West

Dear family and friends –
It’s been a long time since I last posted and we’ve started out roadtrip! We left the New at the end of October. It’s always hard to leave the New, but of course we’ll be back next summer. We spent two good weeks in Pennsylvania (except for the night that two kids went around slashing tires and keying everyone’s cars in town including ours), and then we had a relaxing two weeks in Ohio. Micah left for the roadtrip 3 days early with Toby, and I went up to Wooster and picked up Amber and Addy. Our plan was to stop in Santa Fe to surprise Kate and then Phoenix to surprise Colin. We then had to stop in San Diego to pick up a car that Addy just inherited, then Bishop, CA would be our final destination. But things never work out as planned.
We spent our first night at a rest area in Missouri. Addy slept in the front passenger seat, and Amber and I shared a very skinny bed in the back (there are two cushions, but they’re stacked together until we can take out the only back seat we have with us).You have to sleep head to toe in order to have enough space for both people to lay on their back or stomachs. Then we stopped the next night in Dumas, Texas – about an hour north of Amarillo (where I got the last potato of the day from the Potato Factory – my favorte resturant). Addy’s cousin and her husband and 6 month old son live there. The next day we should have been on our way to visit Kate, but Micah and Toby were in Hueco Tanks Historic State Park near El Paso and I missed Micah. I convinced Amber and Addy that we should go there instead and just see Kate over Thanksgiving. So we headed to Hueco. We ot an empty tank about half way back toward Amarillo and somehow managed to ride another 20 miles before we found a gas station. Amber said “Guys, let’s never do that again”. But what happened after stopping through Roswell, NM
90 miles out of El Paso? In the middle of nowhere? It happens again. We saw a sign for a turn off that said
Dell City 20 Miles
we had to take that turn. To save gas, Amber put the car on cruise control at 55 mph, because what else can you do? It was late and dark and we were in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, that road seemed to be infested with not-so-smart bunnies of all sizes. We had a bunny dart out in front of the car at least once a minute. Sometimes they’d cross the road and then swerve back toward us. My poor vegetarian friends had tears streaming down their faces at the torture that was the bunny road. But Amber only hit one. On the upside, we found a gas station and made it to Hueco with no more incidents. We spent two fun days in Hueco before continuing with our main plan to surprise Colin in Phoneix. We had his address from our friend Catherine who told him she wanted to send him a letter, so we found his apartment complex – which was gated. We sat there for a minute, unsure of what to do, until a resident pulled up behind us and unlocked the gate. At any rate, Colin wasn’t home. Nor was he answering phone calls. Finally, Amber called her friend Emma and we surprised her instead. We spent the night at her house (Colin finally called me back at 11pm and said he’d see us at 6:30 the next evening –after work). But Emma had to work in the morning and couldn’t figure out keys, so we spent the morning in a coffee shop and movie theater (Twilight just came out, so we saw it), and our afternoon in a park in the middle of Phoenix. It was in the 80s and sunny. We finally saw Colin and spent the weekend there. We went bouldering/running around the next afternoon (Emma came too), then we were going to climb Sunday, but Micah called us from Joshua Tree National Park and said Toby was going to visit a friend near San Francisco so we needed to come pick him up. Since we only had 3 seats in my van, we’d have to run to San Diego to get Addy’s car first. We said goodbye to Colin and headed to San Diego, where we met Addy’s family friends who were watching the car (it was her grandma’s who passed away in September) until Addy got there. The family rented us a guest house for the night that had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry room, kitchen, dining room, and living room. It was huge!! The next morning we stopped by the beach for an hour (it was my first time seeing the pacific!! – I think in Alaska it’s the Bearing Sea…) then we took the scenic route over to Joshua Tree. It involved mountains, pine forests, recreational vehicle land, an inland sea, and canyons. It was one of the most scenic drives I’ve ever been on. When we got to JTree, Toby was still there. He’d felt too bad leaving Micah alone, I guess, but he left the next morning. Amber and Addy loved JTree. So did Micah. It was a fun 2 days. Then we ran up to Red Rocks (Las Vegas) for out Thanksgiving trip with Colin and Kate. We ate Thanksgiving dinner at a Denny’s. I felt like I was in the movie “The Santa Clause”. But it was amazing. I ordered a milk shake, pancakes, eggs, toast, seasoned fries, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Everyone else ordered a similar amount of food.
That brings me up to now. I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I’ll write more soon!
Love,
Stella

These pictures are all out of order and for some reason the computer thinks I'm writing links...
The beach!


Phoenix! (Emma's in the second)
Hueco!


Joshua Tree!
Roswell!