Our Adventure: California

At last!!! Que Diana Ross...

3000 miles. 9 states. 10 days in the car. 8 motels. Countless meals on the go.

These little guys are troopers! They loved the view from our 9th-storey room while Mommy and Daddy packed up the suitcases for the last time.

Then they hauled the luggage to the car. By themselves. (Yeah, right!)

After a quick breakfast at Denny's we were on the road for the last leg of our journey--and a short on at that! Only 90 miles!

We headed toward the mountains

and just like that BAM -- we were in California and I missed the sign! Rude!

I googled the image and it looks like this. I plan to go visit my cousins in Reno, so I'll have to pay more attention then.

We climbed and climbed, passing this river and loving the pines!

Since I bragged about skiing in Utah, I'll brag about skiing at Tahoe too. One winter semester in college I even took skiing for PE! Best PE class ever!

I 80 doesn't go this close to Lake Tahoe, but since my husband (and kiddos) had never seen it, we took a little detour and caught some pictures out the window.

Lake Tahoe always amazes me in that it's so blue!

Oh to have a cabin right. here. Only not, because we were on the road and it was full of traffic and there were lots of houses. I was really surprised at how crowded the whole little drive by the lake was on a random Thursday.

Sigh...

Anyway, we felt like we needed to get to our destination, our kids were antsy and we were road weary, and the traffic was annoying! 

We made our way back to I 80 and drove the last hour to Auburn. There was road construction on some of the passes and I. thought. we. would. die. After all of those miles, all of the days in the car, only to die in a collision mere miles from our final destination! They had the shoulder closed and the lanes really really impossibly narrow while we're winding our way up the pass with truckers and regular joes with trailers and the back wheels kept coming over the line into our lane and I was sitting on my hands with my eyes tight shut praying just as hard as I could.

True story. It was awful.

Oh yeah, we lived.

And then it was over. We were there. Here. 

And this fine building is our home for the next four months. Muuuuuuch more on that next time!

So there you have it! Our cross-country trip in a series of little nutshells.

Next time: More about our housing, my husband's schooling and how the kids and I are adjusting! Stay tuned!

Our Adventure: Utah-Nevada

This post is 6 days overdue. We're not still wandering around Salt Lake City! We got the car worked on and drove that day on a set of new tires.

Salt Lake City is beautiful. I love the mountains as a backdrop! I stayed here once on a ski trip in 7th grade and was able to ski in five different resorts in five days. Beautiful!

Our trip started a little later than usual due to our car being in the shop. It runs great now and we're so glad we took the time to get it fixed. There's a lot of nothing between Salt Lake City and Reno, as you're going to see. Or not see, since it's nothing...

At first we drove by The Great Salt Lake

and saw beautiful mountains

 and salt factories. Right? Is that what that is? Is it edible? Used in some other way?

We passed what looked like big mud puddles, but they were white. And hard, evidently, as people had written on the smooth places with rocks. I wonder how many years later you can go back and find your word or name or whatever!

There was this cool modern tree like sculpture thing. It was huge!

And then this.... Nothingness.

I was so preoccupied by the nothing that I almost missed this sign! That's why it's so big--we were that close!

As is Nevada's custom, there was a big flashy casino right over the boarder. What is it with Nevada?! I was a proud, voting, hard-working, tax-paying Nevadan for seven years and love many things about that state. :)

I love this barn but I don't think you could pay me enough to live out there! Seriously, there were tiny towns that probably exist because of the traffic on I 80, but other than that it's hours to either Salt Lake or Reno. And no trees or flowers...

The boys were particularly amused by these triple trailer trucks!

See--nothing!

This was our second-longest day of the trip and we were all feeling the fatigue. Maybe it was because we knew we were almost there... Maybe it was looking at nothing all day! We were happy to see Reno come into view, and even though we only had about an hour and a half left to get to our final destination, we decided to call it quits for the night.

It was dark by the time we made it to our room on the top floor of the Holiday Inn. I didn't take the time to blog but enjoyed the Olympics for about an hour before calling it a night.

So there you have it! A long day with not much to look at, but we're almost done!

Tomorrow: California!

Our Adventure: Idaho to Utah

Our drive today wasn't very long and certainly wasn't as spectacular as the things we've seen the last three or four days! But what did we expect?

We slept in, enjoyed the hotel breakfast (lots of variety for once!), let the kiddos be a little crazy, and loaded up our gear. Again.

There was jumping and crashing on the bed, rides on the dolly, and some spying out our third floor window.

We headed south toward Salt Lake City where we planned to get some work done on our car and enjoy an afternoon off.

We passed more potato, hay and wheat fields on our way. Kinda reminded me of Iowa, only with different crops. Ok, it's a lot drier too.

Does anyone know what this structure is? We saw several of them in our drive across a corner of Idaho. Our best guess is that it's used for potato storage, much like grain bins are used to store soy or corn until the farmer ships it or sells it. Are we right?

The country got drier as we headed south. 

Yay, Utah!

Gotta get my barns!

We caught a few glimpses of Salt Lake as we neared our destination.

We got another hotel room, our seventh, and put the boys down for a much-needed nap. My husband unhitched the trailer and took the car in for a new set of tires. He has an appointment to replace the exhaust manifold in the morning and also plans to get the oil changed. We've put a few miles on our car since we left Iowa!

Speaking of which, here's an updated map of our trip!

We took the boys swimming and they each got to spend some quality time with Turtle the Floatie.

We thought about going to The Old Spaghetti Factory, a family tradition, but it was 20 minutes away, the boys were tired and it was late. We opted for this instead:

Seriously. Fresh made fries, grilled cheese with grilled onions (no meat!) and a chocolate shake. Yum!

And that's when I stayed up too late trying to catch up on blogging! We might make it to our final destination tomorrow, then I'll have to catch up on laundry and unpacking for our 4-month stay in California! Our trip has been a chance in a lifetime, but we're road-weary and anxious to have a place to call home. With the car needing work in the morning, we might not make it the rest of the way (over 9 hours), but we'll try!

So. Tomorrow: Utah, Nevada and maybe ... California!