Holiday Road Trip: The Final Leg Home

We pretty much drove all day with only one meal stop for breakfast. Nearly eight hundred miles later we were home.

Tomorrow we are going to do absolutely nothing and then Monday we will drive to St. Louis and spend a few days with Hans' immediate family and grandmother before he flies back to Anchorage.

I think we still have a few of those beers left...

Holiday Road Trip: White Sands

This morning we drove a short ways to White Sands National Monument and spent the morning playing in the frozen gypsum sands and exploring the dunes (while trying not to lose the car). We spotted families playing on the hills and gave a short ride to a woman who had lost her van (and therefore her husband) while roaming the park and taking pictures.

After a visit to the nearby Museum of Space History in Alamogordo we officially ended our vacation with a large lunch at a chain restaraunt and drove all the way (477 miles) to Abilene, Texas so that we would arrive back in Cape Girardeau by Saturday night.

Say, "I can't see!"

A garden full of desert plants
and rockets is my kind of garden.

A link from the NASA crawler

Holiday Road Trip: More Parks

This time last year we were broken down in Haines Junction, YT, in –20 temperatures and barely 600 miles into our cross-country drive. This morning we arrived at the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest at sunrise. We started with a few very short hikes while we took in the early colors displayed by the scenery. The reds, golds, purples, and blues of the landscape were saturated in the early morning sun. I was surprised by the ancient pueblo remains and petroglyphs in the area.

The petrified forest yielded some interesting pictures of wildlife and mineral remains of fossilized trees.

By noon we were on our way of the last leg of our journey. We left the sunset in southeastern Arizona behind us for the southwest of New Mexico. We arrived very late in Las Cruces, NM and had some of our leftover beer from the night before.