Truckin' up to Buffalo

Day 17: Monday, April 4, 2016
What a long, strange trip it's been! But we did it! We're back! We finally made it! We didn't make it all the way to Seneca Falls. Mom had the brilliant idea of having Dad and Mike meet us in Buffalo, and then Mike and I could have a few days in Niagara Falls to collect ourselves and get ourselves sorted out before the funeral: unpack, laundry, that sort of thing.

We started our day in Terre Haute, IN, birthplace of Jackson. In fact, we even went and did a stalker-y drive by and took pictures in front of his old house. Ah, East Garden Drive South! We've missed you, old friend! We had also missed our actual old friends. Fortunately, a few were able to join us for breakfast, and we were so happy to see even more familiar faces. Then, we did a little geocaching in the woods behind Dixie Bee Elementary, where Jack might have gone to school one day. We didn't get to see all the things I would have liked to, but we'll be back. Somehow, we manage to come back. In fact, this is Tucker's second trip here.

The rest of the day was literally just spent driving. We taught the boys to pee in a jug, because peeing on the side of the road gets more complicated when the road is an urban 6 lane highway without much shoulder in the middle of Ohio. (Huh-why-oh, as Jack says it). We did manage the usual rest area breaks and even a McDonald's/Panera break, as well. We finally met up with Poppa and Mike in a Tim Horton's parking lot outside of Buffalo for the "hostage exchange." We were so happy to have Mike back, but I was very sad to see my mom go.

Over the course of the last five days, I have found myself in a position where no one should ever have to be, though I'm sure it happens all the time. I have wanted nothing more than to shatter into a million pieces and fall apart. This loss is a devastating one, and I feel as though I haven't even begun the grieving process. And yet, that hasn't been an option. I have had to be strong to get myself and my children this far, and I'm starting to realize that I will need to be strong for just a bit longer. I've felt the cracks, though. I know they are forming. And my mother has been the packing tape keeping all the shards together. In her presence, I have felt stronger than I am. I always do. Like during childbirth or any of the other times I've wanted my mommy, it wasn't so much the task I wanted her to complete (though she always does, and willingly), but her quiet strength I wanted to siphon off and use as my own. And now I'm on my own for a few days, and I have to trust that the shards are all braced together and will somehow hold. My family needs me whole, so whole I will remain. Thanks, Mom, for helping me to stay whole.

*   *   *   *   *

This photo marks the end of our epic Family Rock Tour. As we plotted and planned over the last year, I never in a million years would have imagined that this is how our vacation would end. It still seems incomprehensible that this is how it went down. It hardly seemed worth sharing - such a depressing end to something that started out with so much hope and excitement. But I had been taking notes and jotting in journals the whole way, always intending to post updates and play-by-plays for all the interested family and friends, and I decided that finishing the journey here might help me to finish the journey in my head, too. So here's the story, in all it's glory. Perhaps now I can finally rest.

A Little Help From My Friends

Day 16: Sunday, April 3, 2016
So, no unnecessary stops, but this one was completely necessary! Some old friends of mine from college happen to live in Topeka, so we stopped for breakfast on our way past. MATT makes a mean waffle! I hadn't seen them since maybe 2009, so this visit was long overdue and not nearly long enough, but I am forever grateful that they opened their home to us and brought a little light to a very dark journey. I had no idea how much I needed a happy, familiar face. And the boys have not stopped talking about all the awesome Transformer toys at their house.  So, you know, there's that!

The "no stop" thing is rough, though. I had to drive past St. Louis without thinking about the Arch there. We bypassed routes to Chicago and so many other historical sites with cruel disregard. The traveler in me mourned their losses, but the wife in me knows there's just no time for any of this. Mike needs us, and we need him. Having my mother around is immensely helpful, and I wouldn't have made it this far without her, but she's just no replacement for Mike. And she's not supposed to replace him on this trip; that's not her job. But his absence is felt daily, and all I can really think about is getting back to him. Explaining all this to children, however, proves difficult. And I know I said I was ready to accept the consequences of kids in the car all day, but I don't think I really knew what that meant. At one point, our gas light was on, the DTE (Distance To Empty) indicator said there were 6 miles to empty, the nearest exit was 7 miles away, and the signs for the gas station were saying it was 2 miles beyond the exit, and none of my kids were wearing any clothes. As it turns out, my DTE indicator likes to scare me needlessly. We rolled in on fumes, but we rolled in just fine. More than half of us had less than half of our clothes on, but we were fine all the same.

Today was another long haul. I really just needed to get to Terre Haute, IN. We are staying at the home of some friends for tonight, and will meet up with some more friends for breakfast in the morning, and I finally feel as though there's a light at the end of the tunnel.  Terre Haute is within striking distance of home. We're almost there!

Rocky Mountain High/ I can see for miles and miles

Day 15: Saturday, April 2, 2016
I have made an executive decision. No more unnecessary stops. We are just going to power through. This is, of course, a terrible idea. Three kids in the car all day with no real stops is a recipe for utter disaster. I am aware of this. But we're never going to make it, so we are just going to go for it. I am willing to accept the consequences.

Driving through the Rockies was beautiful, and now I'm excited to go back someday and explore them with Mike for real. Our bag of Cheetos exploded, and I'm pretty sure Jackson's ear drums did, too. He spent most of the morning crying, and now that we are down, he is still complaining of tinnitus. Oh well. They'll heal, right?

Driving through the Rockies was beautiful, but everything east of there was something of a nightmare. Did you know that there are almost 200 miles of Colorado east of Denver? Why is there so much Colorado not in the Rocky Mountains?? And did you also know that, on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, you can see for miles and miles because there isn't anything to break up the view? And because there's nothing to break up the view, not even trees, there's never any reason to curve the road? And did you know that there are more than 400 miles of Kansas? And that they are pretty much exactly the same as those last 200 miles of Colorado? That's 600 miles of NOTHING in a very straight line.  Let me say that again. 600 miles. Now, I am positive that those 600 miles must contain some beautiful scenery somewhere, and I'm sure they are full of good, hardworking people. But cheese and rice, that drive should be reserved for people who probably shouldn't be in jail but need something a little more extreme than community service. I never, ever want to do that ever, ever again. The only thing that seemed to break up the day a little was that these boys needed to stop to pee every other exit. I spent the day looking for places to pull over so the kids could pee out the door. (Yes, we pee on the side of the road. I have boys. They can do that. Also, we would never make it anywhere with dry pants if we always had to wait to find a restroom.) Incidentally, i found it very interesting that the roads in most of eastern Colorado are only paved for about 5 feet off the exit where they unceremoniously turn into hard-packed dirt roads. Even the roads that lead into what passes for towns out here aren't all paved. Do the ski resorts of Colorado really have so much pull in the state government that the good people of the Eastern Plains can't get some asphalt? I'm not here to judge, but, well, it seemed a little strange. By no means are all the roads in New York paved, but most of them are. The ones leading off the Thruway definitely are.

We are spending the night in Junction City, KS. The goal for tomorrow is to make it as far as Terre Haute, IN.  If we don't, we will never make it back to Seneca Falls by Monday night. I really need to make it back to Seneca Falls by Monday night.

We spent the day driving, but Tucker took several pictures from the backseat of the van. So let me amuse you with the photographic antics of my 5 year old. I took the Cheeto pictures, but he took the rest of the pictures in this post.

Ship of Fools

Day 14: Friday, April 1, 2016.
What an incredibly long day! We woke up in Tuba City, AZ, and we are ending our day in Glenwood Springs, CO. We have seen so many things in between! The first thing we saw was mountain lion road kill. I wanted to stop and take a picture, but then I decided that a picture of road kill was kind of, well, morbid. I also had this rather irrational fear that the mountain lion was just napping in a rather inconvenient spot and would wake up and pounce on me. But then when I got too far away, I really wished I had done it anyway. It was so weird seeing it on the side of the road like that. It was probably terrifying for whoever hit it, and i was glad it wasn't me. But it was such a beautiful creature, even in death.

As we got farther north, the landscape began to change. We were back in the Four Corners area, and the closer we got to Colorado, and the closer those distant white peaks became, the more I felt as though we were leaving the desert behind. Utah is an interesting place, though, and the landscape changed its mind a few more times before we arrived in Moab.  Moab is where we should have spent the night, and we are waaay off schedule, but I desperately wanted to see Arches National Park, even if it was just for an hour and a half.

As it turns out, 90 minutes is not a very long time when you're trying to see awesome things in the desert.  We had a quick tour of the visitor's center, but I promised the kids we would visit the gift shop AFTER we saw some cool rock formations. They were unimpressed, but we moved on. We didn't have time for much, but we were going to see Delicate Arch if it killed me. Delicate Arch is the most famous arch in the park, maybe even in the world (because, really, how many other arches have you heard of?). If you've ever seen a Utah license plate, that's the featured arch. So we drove all the way out to a spot where you could hike to a lookout to see the arch in the distance. There was no time for actual hiking. I have a 4 year old with me! This little walk was about as much hiking as we could handle. But it was a fun walk! There were rocks to climb over and things to see. It also took significantly longer than I had anticipated. When we realized how late it was, and that the Visitor's Center closed at 4:30 (WHY???), we hopped in the car for a mad dash back to entrance. Nona and Jack hopped out as I rolled past in the parking lot, and got there just in time to have the door shut in their faces. But Nona saved the day and got the guy to give us our badges anyway. She was not about to let her grandsons be denied their Junior Ranger badges two days in a row! We had to wait outside, and that meant no gift shop, which you would think was the biggest tragedy of the trip, but we got our Junior Ranger badges, and that was enough for me. And as it turns out, the tokens for Arches are sold online. So everything was awesome after we discovered that.

Photo Credit: Tucker Barg
He worked really hard on composing this shot.

Oh, wait.  Did I saw "awesome"? I meant "awful". Everything was awful. It was dinner time, and we were only as far as we were supposed to have gotten the night before. I had wanted to be almost to Denver by now. Also, Jackson was starting to complain about his ears when we arrived, but he was all-out crying about them now. No amount of "pinch and blow" seemed to help. We gave him a decongestant, and continued on our way. The best way to help him is to get him down to a lower altitude as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, we need to go up to get down. We found some Afrin in Fruita and that seems to be helping, though. It's strange to be driving past all these places I had intended to stop, and to know I had hotel reservations here, or there's a park I had wanted to visit there.  Someday, we will just have to come back and finish what we started. For now, I have to get my poor Jackson east of the Mile-High City without rupturing his eardrums.

Wish You Were Here

Day 13: Thursday, March 31, 2016
SO. So the plan, once we realized what we were actually in for regarding Mike's dad, was for my mom to fly out and help me get back to NY with my sanity somewhat intact and, hopefully, before it was too late. But then this morning the phone rang somewhere between 3 and 4 AM, and I didn't really want to answer it. Nothing good comes from a telephone that rings out in the night. And for as long as the phone still rang, I could maintain my blissful little bubble of denial. But I had to answer it, and I listened very carefully as my husband told me what I already knew: that Doug was gone. That I wasn't going to make it back in time to say goodbye to a man who has been my second father for the last 18 years. That my husband's world was collapsing, and I couldn't be there for him when he needed me most. On so many levels, and for so many reasons, I was heartbroken. Except for the fact that there was no time for that. There was no time for grief or even reverie. I no longer needed to rush back, but I still had to get back. And I had to get back with kids in tow, kids who still hadn't been to the Grand Canyon even though this was our big Grand Canyon trip. I had miles to go before I could allow myself the luxury of feeling anything. 2300 miles to be exact.

And so we began. It took a huge chunk of the morning to finish packing the car. I had managed to get most of our things re-packed on Tuesday, but getting it all in the car was completely another story. As it turns out, I am neither tall enough nor strong enough to pack a car top carrier. Jack, always eager to climb on top of the car for any reason, was a huge to help to me, although trusting all our clothes to the knot-tying skills of an 8 year-old, even one who is a Bear Scout, was nerve-wracking to say the least. We got a late start and finally headed toward The Grand Canyon just before lunch time. It had already been a really long day, and I couldn't even imagine how much longer it was going to be.

Driving across Arizona, you see lots of signs for The Grand Canyon. However, I wasn't aware how seriously far The Grand Canyon was from pretty much everything. It's far! When we finally arrived, it was already late afternoon. After a brief miscommunication that I do no have the strength to relive right now, we were able to sit through the last Ranger talk, which was required for our Junior Ranger badges, and then we headed to the gift shop first and finally to Mather Point to see this giant rent in the land. You can see what is important to my boys.

The Grand Canyon seems like a silly name for such an immensely ginormous feature. It's like saying the universe is big, or the ocean is damp. "Grand" somehow just doesn't really even begin to cover it. If you've ever been there, you know what I mean.  Letchworth is a grand canyon.  The Grand Canyon, well, that's something else entirely. It struck me how much the boys were moved by it, though. They reported feeling peace (thank you, Montessori school!). Standing amidst crowds of tourists, they remarked on the quiet of the place. We have seen so many beautiful places on this trip, and there have been several times when it has been hard to ignore the divinity I have felt in a place. Even on that crowded point, far from alone and no where near solitude, I was able to find a thread of peace. It was what I desperately needed right then, and I hope to be able to hold on to that thread during the months to come.

We left just before the sun set over the canyon. It was bad enough that I was there without Mike, who had desperately wanted to be there with us. I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy the beauty of the sunset on today of all days, and I didn't want to waste that experience. We will be back, and I will see the sunset over the canyon with him at my side, just as he should be. So we walked back to the Visitor Center to collect our Junior Ranger badges just in time to realize that they were decidedly closed. Jackson was distraught, to say the least. Luckily, I'm sure Aunt Gale will be back here sometime in the near future, and I am willing to bet, given our sob story, that someone will be willing to give her our badges. Most parks let you just mail your booklets in, but the Grand Canyon doesn't seem to have that same policy. If they do, it isn't advertised. We did manage to find our tokens, though. The parks have been selling these little tokens as collector's items. We have grabbed one from every park we've been to, but the visitor's center didn't have them. They were at a different store, which was luckily still open. It was late when we left, and getting dark. And then it started to snow. The boys laughed and said it looked like we were in hyperdrive. A snowstorm in the desert was really the last thing I needed. But we managed to make it to Tuba City by around 10pm or so. We found a hotel with a Denny's, and that was really all we could even hope to ask for. Tuba City is back in the Navajo Nation, where there is nothing for miles but desert and divinity. I have to hope the rest of this trip goes better than today. I don't dare say it out loud, but it can't get any worse.

Going to California with an aching in my heart

Day 12 - Wednesday, March 30, 2016
After Monday's warm-up and the torture of staying home with the kids all day yesterday, I was ready for today's adventure, even though it was far more adventurous than I have ever in my life been with kids. I got up, got myself and everyone else dressed, grabbed ALL THE FOOD, and left without thinking too much about it. I'm actually pretty proud of myself.

We started the day off by heading west. Something you may or may not know about me is that I am a collector of states.  I reached my goal of visiting all 50 states by the time I was 30, and now I'm working on collecting them for my children. (Jackson will have 31 when this is all over!) My boys don't usually have the latest and greatest, but traveling and showing them their world is important to us, so they can say they've been to a lot of different places. So California needed to be collected.  It was right there, a mere hour away.  How could we not? So we drove down I-40 and just across the border to Needles, CA.  Funny thing about Needles is that it is the biggest place (only place?) for miles around.  And yet there is NOTHING to do. You'd think the tourism people would try to capitalize on that. I went so far as to find the visitor's center for an idea of something to do with the kids, and they gave me a "beats me" kind of shrug and sent me to a playground in the local state park. But playgrounds are fun, and rivers are better, so we made do.  

Next, we headed north to Nevada. Hoover Dam or bust! The Nevada desert is beautiful, especially in the rain. Luckily, it was not raining at our destination. However, I desperately missed Mike. Beyond the normal missing of my husband, the Hoover Dam was a place I was not prepared for. I knew there would be tourists, but I was not prepared for the THRONGS of tourists invading one little dam. There were people EVERYWHERE, and driving was nearly impossible. On top of that, parking was a nightmare. Parallel parking is not my gift. I can teach other people to do it over the phone, but I have not successfully managed to do it myself since my driver's test more than half a lifetime ago. (I pretty much epitomize "Those you can't...") The lots were full, but parallel parking spots along the roadway were abundant. Unfortunately, I had to wait for one you could drive into and then just bitchily bully my way into it. It wasn't pretty. And trying to keep an eye on all three boys in all those crowds was also a feat unto itself. I'm already scarred from having lost Tucker at EPCOT.  I wasn't about to do it again! In the end, it all worked out. The three of them held each other's hands and only took out a few passersby with their pulling and swinging antics. It could have been worse. The dam itself was very impressive. I wish I could tell you more about it, but there was no time to read informational signs. As you can see, the boys were not super-impressed, but we bought cacti and suckers in the gift shop, and someone offered them a Hoover Dam rock, whatever that is, so all was not lost, except of course, for us trying to get back to our car. That's the other thing Mike is usually in charge of: finding our car at the end of our adventures.

After leaving the Hoover Dam, we stopped at Lake Mead National Recreational Area. I told the park ranger that we had about 90 minutes before we had to leave, and he suggested we just leave right then and there because there wasn't enough time to do anything, so that was super helpful (it was a day of super helpful tourism information). So, instead, we found a lovely little beach and completed our Junior Ranger booklets until it was time to go pick up NONA! You read that right! Nona is joining us on our epic Rock Tour! My poor mother. All she wants to do is go see LOVE, that Cirque du Soleil Beatles show in Vegas.  She even asked the universe to get someone to invite her out there because my Dad is decidedly anti-Vegas. And it worked! We invited her to Arizona to help me drive this ship of fools home, and Las Vegas is the closest airport, but there is just no time for a Cirque du Soleil show in the schedule. Sorry, Nona! Had Mike been with us, we might have at least driven by it. But the airport was about all the city driving I could handle, so we didn't even do that. Jack wanted to drive down The Strip, but there were just too many cars and lights for me. We found some dinner at an Applebees along our route, and then headed back to Kingman in the dark. But first, we stopped at Walmart and bought a car top carrier, because there is just no other way to get all our stuff home otherwise.  I'm not even sure how we made it out here.

Let it snow?

Day 11 - March 29, 2016

Happy Birthday, Aunt Gale! We wish we could celebrate with you. Today was not a very exciting day. After yesterday, I need more time to mentally prepare for tomorrow, so we just hung out at The Mountain House today. I did learn a few very important things today, though:

1) Despite my best efforts, my children are like little bombs that explode to fill whatever container you are desperately trying to contain them in: the car, a bedroom, a house - they will fill every square inch with their presence. I have spent most of the day emptying the car of their filth (where did all this stuff come from??) and trying to repack their things while cleaning their bedroom.  I have been largely unsuccessful.

2) The desert is not necessarily a hot and dusty place. It has snowed not once but twice today. Unamused.

3) Easter Grass was invented by the devil himself to punish parents for their lies and deceit.

That is all.

Into the Great Wide Open

Day 10 - March 28, 2016

So, today was an adventure!  If you know me well, you know I hate to drive, especially when I don’t know where I am.  Interstate driving is ok, but city driving makes me crazy.  I just don’t see very well, and I’m not a great multi-tasker.  I can figure out where to go OR safely operate a car, but generally not both at the same time.  Having a GPS is immensely helpful, but still not great because I also suck at judging distances.  “Turn left in a quarter mile” means very, very little to me.  Give me, “See that car turning up there? No, the blue one.  That’s where you need to turn.” But in the spirit of wearing big-girl panties, I packed the kids up for a day of fun and leapt into the great wide open.

Our first stop was three hours away.  I’m not sure why I thought that was a good idea.  Three hours is a long way to drive for an hour’s stop, especially when you hate to drive.  But we had skipped it on the way down, which bummed everyone out, so I decided we were going back for it.  It was called Meteor Crater just outside of Winslow, Arizona.  It’s not a national park, but it is a national landmark.  I don’t know what that means, either.  Meteor Crater is aptly, though not very creatively, named.  It is the largest and best preserved meteor crater on the planet.  When they finally figured out that it was, in fact, a meteor crater, they were able to use what they learned to identify other meteor craters across the globe. The crater is just massive.  The meteor came in at something like 26,000 mph and created the crater in just 10 seconds.  It’s 600 feet deep, a mile across, and, on its floor, you could watch 20 different football games on 20 different fields at the same time with 2 million spectators sitting on the sides watching.  It was also incredibly windy.  It has been windy around here, but there were t-shirts proclaiming “I survived the winds at Meteor Crater!” so I suspect it’s usually pretty bad.  I took the kids up to a pretty high viewing area, and Max was almost blown away!  He had trouble staying standing, and even I had to brace myself against the wind to remain upright.  But the view was spectacular!

After that, we continued on with our space theme and drove into(!) Flagstaff to the Lowell Observatory.  The Lowell Observatory is where Pluto was discovered and also where they figured out that the universe is, in fact, expanding.  We don’t normally do guided tours, but that’s pretty much all we did here.  Our tour guide, Travis, was excellent, so we took both of the tours he was offering that day.  The first was all about Pluto.  We were a little early, so Travis showed the kids all sorts of cool things the museum had on display, and even a few things they didn’t.  We learned a lot about Pluto.  The guy who actually discovered it was not actually a real astronomer.  Percival Lowell had been looking for Planet X for years, but he died never having found it (though he did photograph it at one point and just missed it!).  After his death, his brother gave the observatory a large sum of money to finally find it.  No one, however, wanted to do it.  It was a boring project.  To find a planet, you take photographs and compare the dots.  Thousands and millions of dots.  So, finally, the janitor volunteered to do it. He didn’t have enough money for college, but he was an amateur astronomer, and he thought that by working at the observatory, he might just learn “by osmosis.” (I actually hate that phrase.  Osmosis requires water.)  Anyway, as Travis tells it, it worked out for him because just 10 months later he found Pluto exactly where Lowell had thought it would be, even though Lowell’s calculations were wrong because everyone assumed Pluto would be another gas giant and we all know today that it is not.  He got lots of scholarship offers and plenty of fame, and he went on to study more about Pluto and eventually got sent off on New Horizons on its journey past Pluto.  Here’s something else I learned from Travis.  Since New Horizons has enough velocity to actually escape the solar system, Clyde Tombaugh’s remains (that’s the janitor’s name) will actually survive the death of our solar system.  And since space is so vast, statistically speaking, there is very little chance that New Horizons will ever collide with anything.  His remains could theoretically survive the death of our galaxy and who knows what else.  Talk about immortal!  Another cool thing that we learned was that sometimes, Pluto is actually closer than Neptune.  The way that the elliptical orbits work out means that sometimes planets are closer and sometimes farther, but Pluto’s elliptical orbit actually brings it closer to the sun during a part of Neptune’s orbit that brings Neptune further away.  During this time, Pluto even has an atmosphere because a thin layer of this giant nitrogen lake on the surface evaporates.  Jack was fascinated.  He has been telling this to just about everyone who will listen.  The other tour was to see this gigantic telescope that, at one point, was the best that money could buy.  It was Lowell’s original telescope that he set the observatory up with.  We got to see the telescope and the dome that rotated with clockwork since there was no electricity in Arizona at the time (it was the wild west back then).  We also learned a bit about spectrometry and our expanding universe.  Even Max listened to most of it.  I was impressed.

I also learned from Mike that his father will not be stable enough for Mike to return to us.  I returned to Kingman with a heavy heart, and brought the kids to IHOP for dinner. There wasn't much chance of turning the day around after that, but pancakes for dinner is always a good start. I guess these big-girl panties will have to stay on a bit longer.