ROAD TRIP!

There are, of course, so many many things on which to write updates, but for now I will say that the weekend of moving madness was a) stressful, b) painful, and c) tearful. We were in a frenzy trying to get the place cleaned up and in the end, I believe we left it absolutely immaculate for our renters, who I hope will enjoy and appreciate the few plants that we left behind for her (the rest found a home with our newly married friends Kim and Jared!). We crashed at 12:30 and decided to allow ourselves to wake up whenever our bodies would allow, which ended up being around 7 am this morning. An hour and a half of loading the car and making final trash runs down, we piled ourselves and our belongings into the Prius and headed out for St. George, Utah, our first stop on the cross-country move.

The San Diego to Las Vegas drive we've done several times and, aside from the usual Riverside ugly and the traffic headaches, made it to Vegas in good time. This was the first time either of us have gone past Vegas on I-15, so I wasn't sure what to expect. At first, it was just dusty (like the 30 miles or so between the Nevada-Cali border and Vegas itself), but then the topography changed and we started seeing beautiful mesas and mountains with red streaks and striations. I was behind the wheel and I was concentrating mostly on not being blown off the road by the crazy winds with which we had dealt from Victorville on ... and then, all of a sudden, we dropped about a thousand feet in elevation in just a few miles and entered Arizona. The route on the GPS looked like the road was going to start winding, and within a couple miles the speed limit dropped from 75 to 55 and we started making hairpin turns through the most stunning and jaw-dropping mountains. The road had clearly been made by blasting to expand a very narrow valley and when we were driving through, it was just us, teeny little cars, insignificant against the scale of these iron-red monoliths standing like natural monuments to the gods that formed this amazing landscape. Talk about feeling small. We were both so in awe that it took me a few minutes to even say "Hey, get the camera!!" ME. I was just proud that I stayed on the road ...

This spectacular drive lasted just about 10 or 15 miles and then we were back to sweeping vistas that, though somewhat less grand in scale, were nonetheless beautiful. Sadly, we didn't get any shots off during that killer part of the drive, but even if we had, I'm not sure it would have captured the feeling of being any army of ants in steel boxes traversing the country at the foot of those mountains. It. Was. Ridiculous. Here are two that I pulled out of Nick's shots a few minutes later in the drive. I hope you can get a sense of the red color of the hills (the scenery in St. George is similar to this; in fact, our hotel is called the Best Western "Coral Hills" because of the color of the mountains ringing the town).


So the drive through the NW tip of Arizona was probably the best surprise of today's trip, but the worst surprise of the drive was in the aforementioned dusty stretch of Nevada between the Cali border and Vegas. Every time we drive this region, regardless of season, we always seen TONS of dust devils (you know, the cyclones of dust that are most typical of the Southwest). So, par for the course, we saw many many dust devils. I'm not terribly afraid of most natural disasters: we rode out a hurricane in Pensacola and I didn't bat an eye, we've shimmied through several earthquakes in SoCal, etc. But, good LORD, tornadoes have ALWAYS freaked me out. I remember one Dad's Weekend at Illinois, as my dad and I were driving back up to Chicago so I could spend the following Thanksgiving week at home, and it was stormy and nasty and we saw funnel clouds that made me clench so hard I probably took some of the seat with me. Terrified. And I remember squealing at dust devils, particularly when they came close to the road, on our last cross-country move, from Pensacola to San Diego. But I've become more immune to their creepy, crazy fear-inducing ways and now they don't bother me so much. So. On this particular drive today, I was cruising up I-15 and saw one after another after another. But they weren't huge. And THEN. Oh my goodness gracious. Nick was in the passenger seat reading so he didn't see it coming, but I saw a BIG ASS dust devil heading straight for the highway on a dead-on course to intersect me. I had just enough to time to gurgle something between "HELLLLLO!" and "HOLD ON!!" (I'm sure it came out "HELLON!") and Nick looked up to see swirling debris all around us. Thankfully, I also had a split second to check all of my mirrors and make sure no one was immediate to us, because that dust devil was as wide as all three lanes of the highway and maybe even wider and it blew me right into the next lane, even though I was prepared and was already course-correcting my steering in preparation. I couldn't believe we missed the pieces of truck tire rubber that were swirling around us. It took me a few seconds to realize my cruise control had kicked off ... but I just kept thinking "DUDE. I just drove through a tornado!" Awesome.

Tomorrow we are taking a more leisurely drive through some of Utah's National Parks (Zion, Bryce, and Capital Reef, plus Escalante). Nick will likely be doing most of the driving, and my camera will of course be at the ready ...