Mama, mama, many worlds I've come since I first left home...

Home, sweet home!  We got home from our trip on Tuesday and were greeted with hell-like temperatures in the 107-109 degree range.  To compound matters, we are renovating our home and the guys cut our AC lines, so we have been without AC downstairs for 6 days now, so the whole house is sweltering.  We would've left and gone to the lake, but they took our fence down between us and our neighbors, and we need to see that project through to make sure they finish.  Enough bitching out of me...let's talk about what I'm grateful for!

I'm grateful to live in this awesome country, where even though we have a circus clown for a president, we have the most beautiful landscapes to discover and the most interesting people to meet.  On this trip, we went exactly 7,000 miles door-to-door and explored ten states.  We spent a couple days in Jackson Hole, WY, three days in Yellowstone National Park, whose beauty is indescribable, hung out in the quaint waterside town of Coeur d'Alene, ID, saw Dead & Company shows at The Gorge, Autzen Stadium in Eugene, OR, Isleta Amphitheatre in Albuquerque and the two shows to wrap up the tour at Folsom Field in Boulder.  We got to explore Pikes Market in Seattle, the oldest continuously operating fish market in the country, went to Vashon Island to see Kelly's sister Sherri and her son, Matt and his sweet fiancé, Alyce, fell in love with Oregon, drove through wildfires in Northern California.  We got to enjoy Dylan's 19th birthday in Las Vegas, which was really cool.  After being warned not to drive through Teton Pass, we drove right through it (at 20 miles an hour!).  We spent a good amount of time driving along The Continental Divide.  We saw breathtakingly beautiful mountains, lakes, waterfalls, hot springs, geysers, wild bear, buffalos, caribou, bald eagles and the Pacific Ocean.  We got to hang with Bill Walton in Sugaree.  We met some of the biggest characters you can imagine and we got to spend fantastic quality family time.

I'm grateful that all of our kids are happy and healthy and enjoy spending time with us.  We know that jobs, marriage, college, etc will all come into play at some point, so we are full of gratitude for the quality time we get to spend as a family.  Avery was in Thailand for most of this trip, but we got to meet her in Albuquerque, so that was a great ending to a terrific trip that we will all remember forever.  We are also thankful to Sugaree for making the entire 7,000 mile journey without any real issues (other than no headlights from Northern Oregon to home, so we just avoided driving at night). This brings Sugaree's total to 40,000 miles since we bought her three and a half years ago and 40 states and a little bit of Canada.  The experience of being able to jump onboard with my family and "sail" across America is liberating and exciting.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, this entire trip seemed to be like driving along the Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion as doors opened for us everywhere we turned.  We discovered new states that we knew little to nothing about...Idaho and Oregon as a couple examples.