The first 1412 miles

When I plugged the location of all our credit card and ATM transactions from Nov 3rd to 10th into google maps, and then added in a few untracked detours, it shows we traveled 2888 miles.  Not too shabby for 2 cars, 4 people, 1 tortoise, and a few household odds 'n ends.  What surprises me is that we never had a fraud alert show up on any of our cards.

Let's review the trip with the help of some pictures: 

First: our vehicles of transportation. We put most our stuff on an ABF trailer so we wouldn't have to worry so much about snowstorms or other unpredictable obstacles. That left us responsible for our two cars and their sparse (but important!) contents. We stopped at an overlook in Oregon to get one last glimpse of the tan-and-brown landscape we'd been living in.

Ally and Cora rode together with me the entire trip.  Chris said he would switch at any time, but they did very well. We chatted, sang, listened to music, colored, read books (not me), and watched the scenery go by.  Every afternoon they got to watch a movie, courtesy of a kind friend who gave us her portable DVD player with 2 screens. Daddy says Mildred didn't cause any trouble in his car, so it seems everyone had an enjoyable ride.

Here are Cora and Ally at the end of our first day.  I took them over to see the Twin Falls, ID temple and let them run around before sequestering them in the hotel room.  We ate dinner at Cafe Rio that night. Yum!

We got a good look at the gorge and the bridge outside Twin Falls before getting on the highway the next morning.

(Something else we saw but didn't get picture of: a black bear in Oregon. He looked like he was going to cross the highway in front of my car. He would've made for some very unique roadkill; I'm glad he changed his mind and ran back up the hill.)

We stopped off at Little America in the middle of Wyoming to use the potty and let the children climb on a dinosaur. Cora also stomped around in a tiny snow pile, and Ally and I threw a few snowballs at each other. Thankfully, that was the extent of our wintery-weather encounters. I guess we had just missed one storm, and were a day or two ahead of the next. We spent the night in Rawlins, Wyoming and had dinner in a retro diner.

We stopped in Gothenburg, NE for a few minutes to get gas and see an old Pony Express depot. (Good thing that was not a real horse, 'cause Ally liked hanging on his tail.)

Two hours later we were in Hastings, Nebraska-- the birthplace of Kool-Aid. We went to the Hastings Museum to take our picture with a true-to-life Kool-Aid man and see his footprints, but that section was under renovation and a lot was missing. But, we did get to sample some Kool-Aid, see some premiums/prizes, watch a few old commercials, visit a mock-up of the original store, and pose in some cut-outs. Then we toured around/ hung out in the rest of the museum.

Did you know the museum's founder is buried in the floor on the lower level amongst a collection of old cars? The middle level is full of taxidermy-d wild animals in diorama displays. The upper level had a huge mid-western history exhibit along with an extremely large collection of stuffed birds-- including a few passenger pigeons (I, for years, had mistakenly thought they were called "passenger" pigeons because they were big enough to be ridden on. Chris laughed and kindly corrected me on that after a year of marriage.)