Sunday, August 17, 2008

Home -- Alisa says – August 8 & 9, 2008

We got up on Friday morning in Santa Fe, packed up the car, consulted our maps, had a final waffle as Las Palomas and hit the road home at 8:10am MT. I took the first driving shift as we drove South from Santa Fe to pick up Route 40 East across Texas and into Oklahoma!

My favorite roadside attractions on the trip were the antelope in NM and the crazy combine sculpture in Willamsburg, IA (later found to be implements called ‘wheat trailers’); while Mom’s favorite roadside attractions were windmills and rest stops. We sighted windfarms on this leg of the trip in San Jon, NM and then again near Varga, TX. Ahhh, the beauty of sustainable energy!

We made it thru the Texas panhandle and into state #9 of our journey at 3pm CT. Oklahoma! surely lived up to its punctuation. Beautiful state, good drivers and a lovely turnpike with a nice tolltaker who told me I had a beautiful smile…mom loves opera singers, but I do have a thing for a man in a toll booth.

We slogged into Joplin, MO and snagged the last room in the town for the night at about 9pm. The town was full with Vietnamese-Americans in town for a pilgrimage to Marian, MO. We split a beer for dinner and fell asleep watching ‘House’.

Saturday was my 39th birthday and it felt just right to be spending it heading home. We left Joplin at 7:20am CT and headed toward St. Louis. We crossed the Mississippi at noon and deviated from our AAA TripTik by heading toward Indianapolis instead of Chicago.

The weather got cooler as we drove and we hit some big rain outside of Fort Wayne, IN. We arrived in the Great Lake State at 8pm ET to beautiful blue skies and those wonderful state troopers who don’t even blink when you buzz past going 80! I think he recognized that I was a native. We had a wonderful trip and saw so many beautiful places, but coming home to MI after 8 days, 3110 miles and 10 different states was pretty fabulous. It took us another hour & 15 mins to get to Ann Arbor. We ended up back where we started at 9:45pm on 8/9/08. Thanks Mom, for a wonderful time!

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