Summer Vacation 2017

Be careful what you say. Someone once told me they liked my vacation posts on this blog. I remember that. Thus you get what follows.

When we lived in Texas, we did four major three-week summer vacations (we missed the first summer because Kelli broke her ankle). The first was to the west, but the other three were to the north/northeast/northwest, motivated in part by the expectation that we would be moving to California, from where it would be much harder to drive to places like Maine.

But it took us living here four years before mounting a major expedition. I don’t quite recall the reasons for that at the moment, and it probably wouldn’t be interesting even if I did. But late last year we decided that we had to get back to Texas, and we would be best to do it before the older boys disappeared into college and jobs. We very much wanted to return to see our church and friends in the Lone Star State. But if we were going that far, we certainly needed to visit Kelli’s parents in Illinois. And from there the trip became a matter of adding and connecting dots.

This blog is not written in real-time. My father taught me not to advertise when I was away from home, making it pretty impossible to do all the real-time social media stuff that everyone else does (with an exception made if my family is at home). So part of the mystery is already spoiled: we did indeed survive our 7,000-mile adventure. But perhaps there is enough other mystery to warrant reading on.

With this introduction out of the way, I expect that I ‘ll let the photos do most of the talking. Ideally I plan to post about a day or two of our 25-day trip every day or two, with the goal of finishing by the end of July. When we get to Oregon, you ‘ll know we ‘re getting close.

To start this adventure, I ‘ll note that we pulled out in the early hours of June 1, having already arranged for Bethany to miss her final finals. Luke and Mark graduated from high school a week earlier, and I had been home from Dubai and Rome for 10 days already. We wanted to make it to Dallas for the weekend, so we set off in our Chrysler minivan with two days to cover 1,500 miles.

On the first day we made a brief stop in Phoenix to visit with one of Kelli’s friends from junior high. (Yes, they ‘ve kept in touch for a long time.) She works in a law office which has a nice view of some Phoenix mountains.

Then we were off to Lordsburg, New Mexico, which has the distinction of straddling the Continental Divide. It is popular with hikers for about two weeks a year, but the rest of the time, you can get a hotel room pretty cheap. Since we are now forced to reserve two hotel rooms (that’s one of those reasons we haven’t been on a big trip in four years), we like cheaper rooms. At other places on our trip, we experienced the opposite.

I tell people not to take pictures out of the car window because they won’t come out, but they don’t listen.

The second day was a longer drive with no stops other than the required. Perhaps the two highlights of the day were (1) seeing into the impoverished villages of Mexico when we drove through El Paso and (2) seeing that first 80 mph speed limit sign in Texas. By request of one of our older sons, we bought dinner at Whataburger.

We use a GPS, but we also have a AAA membership, and I made sure to stop by and pick up the necessary maps and mark our route on them beforehand.

By the time we arrived in the Dallas area, there was a Texas-sized storm going on. It was dark by now and this hour was probably my least favorite hour of driving on the trip. But a wonderful home was waiting for us in Richardson, offered by church friends who were away most of the weekend and let us “take over.” Tomorrow when we woke up, we would see if our old Texas haunts were as we remembered them.