Summertime at last

Happy Thursday! This morning it was like 85 degrees at 10 o'clock! FINALLY. I don't know about you guys, but I basically live my life for summer -- not for the school's out yay feeling of yesteryear, but for the weather. I can't stand this cold stuff, I need it to be hot out all day. But you may have noticed (probably because I keep telling you) that the summers here have been less than cooperative. But it's hot this week, so what more can I ask.

And you know what's a good summer time activity? Road trips. You know what the weather was like on ours? Pretty cold. So whatever. So what if we decided not to see the Grand Canyon because it was snowing and the low was going to be 19 degrees that night. Or that we didn't get to go into Joshua Tree because the roads were "flooded." :<

The funny thing is, though, that we survived the whole thing, and I got back to work on time and all that, but then we both got sick right after and we're still recovering from that. So much for coming back from vacation all refreshed.

Here's the highlights from my bank statement:
10/04 - Falafel King Boulder CO - $7.05
10/04 - Culver's Colorado Springs CO - $5.89
10/05 - Safeway Store Trinidad CO - $29.93
10/06 - Chevron Seligman AZ - $1.69
10/06 - Juanhijos Burit (the burrito counter next to the subway counter in the Chevron gift shop) Seligman AZ - $6.97
10/07 - Legends Classic Diner Glendora CA - $5.71

Why was a falafel pita so much!! Is my first response, actually. At the Safeway I bought a fruit bowl and a yogurt for breakfast, and some jerky and cheez-it for the road, and some pop tarts and some apples. They didn't confiscate my last apple at the border, but we did have to hand over the bag of bruised oranges the lady at Meteor City sent with us.

Well it sure was fun seeing the northern part of the southwest. Not quite as deserty as I had imagined. New Mexico started out positively Great Plainsy, that was definitely a place where the deer and the antelope play. Arizona had just as much non-desert, especially around Flagstaff where the mountains came down and there was just pine forest on either side of the highway for miles and miles and miles. California looked like California. There were Joshua trees everywhere except for Joshua Tree.

Driving through the major towns, though, was an experience. Here in SoCal, it's so normal to drive for two or three hours straight through city after suburb after city. When we first got into NM, we drove that long without seeing so much as a gas station. Santa Fe was a gift shop, and Albuquerquer came and went without much fuss. The towns in the desert are really more like hubs that the roads connect. Once we got into CA, it was almost obvious, it was just plain populated. Why is that? Literally one side of the Colorado River is a trailer park, and the other is a full fledged town.

It all seems like so long ago. I guess that's what 8 hour work days will do to ya. I wish I had better pictures, but when I pulled out my camera in Golden, CO, the battery was nearly dead. :< It must have turned itself on on the plane or something, so I ended up just using my camera phone. Which was alright, but rather limited. I just put some pics up on Facebook, you can see a lot of the same picture over and over. Road, a low row of mountains to the north, desert to the south, clouds straight ahead but never above. It was like we never moved at all.

-Steph