The drive home

The drive home from Utah was a little wild. Overall, the experience was twenty times better than the drive to Utah, but there were some hiccups. First off, we had to leave a couple of days later than planned because of a crazy storm. We still packed everything up the night before, got up early the day of, but then stayed in Utah after Joseph came back in from attempting to shovel the driveway only to find that it was solid ice. We took advantage of the few extra days to go to Deseret Book and Seagull Book since we don't have those in Austin, and driving around town was a crazy experience. It was sort of like driving on an ice skating rink. A little Zamboni work and we probably could have ice skated to the store with less trouble than we had driving. We discovered, upon arriving, that many stores were closed for the weather anyway.
We did finally leave town on the 31st of January. Roads were still pretty scary - it had been a wet slushy snow at first, followed by an immediate freeze that lasted several days - and we didn't have chains. Luckily we got through Utah and frozen, miserable Colorado, and it was smooth sailing from there on out. We stopped in Albuquerque where we had a hotel reservation so as to avoid any possible mishap in that area again. Since we booked ahead of time we got a great deal on a nice room. The kids had a blast running around and stretching their legs and were so cute sleeping in that bed together. We set up Elinor's pack-n-play in the closet.



Joseph and I brought a Martinelli with us to toast the new year (at 10:30 pm). Good times. :)

More driving the next day, through much milder weather. It was sort of fun to cart 6 inches of snow on the roof of our car through New Mexico and a lot of Texas. We got a few funny looks from other travelers.
Here are some of the windmills we passed that I thought were really neat. You can sort of see them.

Dinner break at Taco Bell.
Overall, a pretty fun family trip. I wouldn't want to do it every day though.