Day 8: We made it to the West Coast!

It's been an interesting few days. We've really been lax with updating anything (not even video blogs), mostly because there's been a lot of stress involved. But, we are finally on the West Coast! We saw the Pacific Ocean yesterday and are in Monterey currently. Today will be spent at the Monterey Bay Aquarium then it's on to San Francisco! Yesterday was just driving...nothing but driving. The evening before was in Las Vegas, which was pretty neat. We stayed in the Luxor, which was awesome, and saw Criss Angel's show (it's a partnership with Cirque du Soleil) which was really awesome! We also survived two nights of camping and saw the Grand Canyon at sunset! To give you some kind of idea what shape we were in yesterday, here's a video...

We will try to be more diligent updating this as we go along!

Day 4: Hey look...it's the desert!

Good morning from Phoenix, Arizona! We made it through Day 4...we weren't sure that we would for a while. At first, driving from Cortez, CO to Phoenix was like Kansas 2.0...but it improved massively. We made it to the Four Corners Monument...in the middle of nowhere. It was one of those things that we can say we did it and we never have to do it again. An amusing story from this leg of the journey, though, involves Chris and his game of buying new and different drinks at gas stations. He likes to see what crazy things he can find since we're not in Indiana. Well, he bought these two drinks that were supposed to give you energy with some kind of natural powder...I think. I really don't know, the label said you were supposed to drink two or three of them a day. Chris got two of them and let me have one. It. Was. Horrible. Chris' flavor was decent...mine was not. Chris told me that I should just take one big gulp for the heck of it...which I was in the middle of doing when we hit a bump. The drink went all over me and my brand new shirt that I had taken the tags off of THAT MORNING. Now, there's yellow spots from the powder that really looks to be radioactive. I was not amused. We did make more video blogs yesterday. I will apologize for the first one now. You can tell that we're bored and we were trying to think of something to do. We started just rambling, which is why the first video is almost 10 minutes long.

We're going to (hopefully) be camping the next two nights, so there won't be posts for a few days.  We'll post again when we're in Vegas! :)

Day 3 - Mountains are cool...really cool! Kansas is not.

Good morning from Cortez, Colorado!! We didn't manage to blog Sunday night because there really wasn't anything to write about. Chris wrote a blog on his site (Theguion.wordpress.com) called "Kansas. Sucks." and that's pretty much a summation of Day 2. We spent that night at my friend Lisa's house in Denver, which was fun. We did make a video of ourselves on the drive through Kansas.

Now, this was before we got to the really...really...horrific, desolate flatland that is most of Kansas. It's cool for a little while, but then it turns brown (with a little bit of green here and there) and flat. You also drive in a straight line. I almost cried.

The top picture is all we saw for hours and hours. Notice the miles on the GPS until the next turn and what is around us....we celebrated when we saw the Colorado border!!

Today was the first day we deviated from the GPS. The Garmin, along with Vader (who has remained muted), wanted to take us South through Colorado Springs and not through the Rockies. That was deemed unacceptable and we headed West on I-70. As we climbed through the haze of the local forest fires, we found out that driving through the mountains isn't as remote as we had thought. We definitely stopped at a Starbucks and got coffee!!! 

Talking to Dad on speaker to tell him how cool it is that we are at Starbucks!

We continued on further into the mountains and higher in elevation. Stopping at a turn-off, half an hour was quickly whittled away by hiking and taking pictures. It was so unbelievable! We also took a Day 3 video as we were waiting for what seemed like forever to start down the mountain because of construction taking the road down to one lane.

 The rest of the drive was just as spectacular, with different lanscapes and winding roads keeping things interesting. If anyone remembers the most awesome Nintendo 64 game, Cruisin' USA, Chris definitely played one of the songs from that as we were driving through the mountains. It pretty much topped off what was already a fantastic drive! There was another scenic lookout point that we quickly lost another half an hour taking pictures. The drive through Kansas was (almost) worth it just to get to the Colorado drive yesterday. 

Today we head to Four Corners and then on to Phoenix for the night!

Day 1: Irish Pop Music, Darth Vader, and Beignets

"I'm Bill S. Preston, Esquire!"

"And I'm Ted 'Theodore' Logan!"

"And we are..." ON A MASSIVE ROAD TRIP!

Hello from Kansas City, Missouri! We made it here safe and sound with no issues. Three states down, a million to go.

As we pulled out of the driveway, Chris commented that we could stop saving face now. My response was, "Yeah, I pretty much hate you." Chris nodded affirmatively. Then, we laughed our heads off! He decided that our first song of the trip would be "Roll Out" by Ludacris. Quite the song choice. Then, his music program decided that we needed to listen to "We Are Young" several times in a row...the first time was great, but subsequent times not so much. We promptly switched to his iPod. Cue the Irish pop music.

Amidst the Irish pop music was Darth Vader. He's the voice on our Garmin and he tells us where to go. He also tells us that "I see that you have control of your feelings...good...this journey will have many trials along the way." No kidding! :) After a while, he got annoying, so we muted him. We're both still alive, so clearly the Force doesn't have much control over us...or Vader's powers have diminished over the past 25 years.

We did have to dodge a chair/desk/some random piece of office furniture that was in the middle of the road on I-70. That was fantastic and rather exciting.

Lunch was spent making sandwiches in our car in a Walmart parking lot somewhere in Illinois. It was pretty much awesome! Granted, I'm sure the people around us were wondering what the heck two people were doing with a ton of food in the car in a Walmart parking lot. On second thought, maybe not. It might not have even phased them.

Dinner was with our great friend Jen, who has graciously let us stay with her tonight. We ended the evening by having dessert (beignets...yum!!) at this cool little place that has live jazz music every night.

Tomorrow we head to Denver, Colorado. It's a nine hour drive, so we'll be up early!

Until then...good night!