July 5th

Road Trip - Day 1

I had been intending to leave at 6 am, but if you know me then you know that's not when we left.

I guess you could blame it on too many late nights in a row, but that is pretty typical of me.

You could also say it's because I didn't pack until the last minute, which is also true, and also very typical (which is quite frustrating to Alex . . . good thing he loves me anyway).

We did manage to leave by 8 am, so I still felt like it was a great start to a long road trip - 

UTAH bound

with stops just about every where in between!

Call me crazy, but I actually do like road trips, and my kids are old enough now (and there is a plethora of electronics to keep everyone happy), that road trips are so much more enjoyable. Gone are the days of bottles and diapers, and I DON'T miss that on long drives!

A couple hours into the drive we had the idea to document our travels, starting with pictures and mileage count. (So I may or may not have been driving while taking this picture :S )

Cue the happy children picture . . . 

. . .oh wait. Jeremiah!

Texas is known for being hot, but this friends, is a bit ridiculous. 




Needless to say, the children were slightly less then excited to stop at rest stops, especially when I was encouraging walking breaks. Evidently, this is a form of torture, or so I am told.
I remember one rest stop where I made the kids walk around the entire gas station and parking lot before getting back into the car . . . grumble, grumble, grumble. A couple of the kids turned it into a race to get it over with, the other one chose the drag-it-out option, with a lot of foot dragging :(


I don't remember anymore where this overpass was exactly, or even which city it was near, just somewhere on I-20.
I thought it was pretty cool though.




There isn't much to see in west Texas, except this awesome storm that we were heading straight into.



The funny thing was that this storm REALLY cooled things down! Remember that 113 from earlier? Seriously, within a matter of 10 minutes into the storm it had significantly cooled off!

Like I said, there really isn't much to see in west Texas, but isn't this dust storm cool?





Then we arrived in El Paso! First destination of the day, and one that I had been looking forward to. Call me crazy, but for some reason going to see the boarder sounded like a fantastic thing to do. I had seen it from an airplane before, and it was nothing like what I had grown up envisioning. I guess I had pictured a huge river, and a big wall on one side with tons of guards and guns. I'm not sure I can describe how awed I was over this fence. It seemed so crazy to me to be driving right next to the boarder rather than the miles of emptiness that I had envisioned.



I mean, LOOK - THAT'S MEXICO!!!!

It's like a giant city with a big fence down the middle! One very striking difference was the poverty on one side of the fence and the obvious wealth on the other. Could you imagine that as your view?
The other very interesting thing was how much security was on the American side of the fence, and how little security was on the other side.

We drove back and forth along the 20 mile boarder a few times, totally in awe of the sites. There were three gates between the two countries, and long lines of cars waiting to cross (especially the trucks). We also saw a lot of bus stops at the boarder, dropping of pedestrians that walked across the boarder back into Mexico at the end of the day.

We finally were able to leave El Paso, unfortunately our travels has us there during rush hour, in addition to the road construction that limited our inexperienced city-tourist travels. 

On to New Mexico. . .