road trip recap

so after leaving santa fe, we headed northwest through colorado to utah to meet my brother and his wife in moab. on the way we stopped in pagosa springs to spend the evening in wonderfully relaxing hot springs and then onto mesa verde national park for some camping. we spent a day seeing arches national park and then onto canyonlands national park for an 11 mile hike through one tiny little bit of the huge park with my bro and chie. then we made our way from moab, accross utah and into capital reef national park. we headed south toward bryce canyon and down toward antelpope canyon in northern arizona. then we headed east (finally in the right direction of boston) into new mexico and back up through colorado's san juan mountains and eventually the rockies. that "little square" of driving that we did throught the south west was about 1500 miles worth of driving, so at that point we were definitely ready to start heading in the right direction toward home.

driving through the rockies was definitely the most challenging part of the road trip because it was pouring with rain that eventually turned to snow. every other car besides ours was a HUGE truck or SUV which meant when they passed us we could barely see because the ater from their tires splashed onto our windshield. then on top of that, because the altitude was so incredibly high (about 12000 feet) and because our car doesn't have a very powerful engine, we really struggled to get up to more then 40 miles an hour on the hills. meanwhile, it was freezing but we had to have the airconditioning on for the defroster to work well enough to see, but that takes power from the engine, so yeah, fun times! i have never been so happy to get onto flat land in kansas in my life. and that probably explains why depite the amazingly striking landscapes of the southwest, i found liked kansas best as a state out of all the ones we went to. and to be fair to kansas, it is the only one in which we didn't pass any stripmalls, and few chain stores. instead it was filled with tiny working class farm towns with the name written on water towers and one main st with a bank, a post office, and a few local stores. and of course there was a ton of very green farmland that was indeed flat as a pancake. it was so nice to have a break from seeing the same hotels, the same ugly strip malls, the same arby's or denny's restaurants to eat it. we were beginning to wonder if there was such thing as a real town anymore or if the entire US have become sprawling stripmalls.

having said that, i cannnot put into words the striking beauty that is the vast landscape of the southwest. it was amzaing and strange and unlike anything i could have ever imagines. but everything was dry and hot and dead at the same time. i am glad to have visited the desert, and it was great not having mosquitos around, but i think jon and i are both more at home in "wet" landscapes, where it rains and snow, where there is green grass and trees and lakes and ponds and ocean.

through kansas and onto missouri to visit my friend elissa in st louis for a few days. then back through illinois indiana, ohio, pennsylvania, new york, connecticut and finally back into massachusetts.

and then the inevitable happened. 50 miles from boston, just over the state border, we stopped in sturbridge to get our state inspection sticker for our car. when we were heading back to the highway on the main st., some dude decided he is impatient with waiting to turn left and runs a stop sign, jumping right in front of us. we had to slam on the breaks. the good news is we didn't hit him. the bad news is, we were hit from behind. and after all that driving, our car is pronounced totalled. by by little red horse. even though it drove just fine, the insurance company says the damage costs more to fix then what the car is worth. my first two days back in boston were spent in bed with a very bad case of whiplash in my neck and back. needless to say, it was not a very good start to our new life here. but we are both safe and in one piece, and at the end of the day, that is what matters. thankfully no one else was hurt either.

i am still sorting through the hundreds of photos that i took on our trip but i promise i will put add a link asap.