Arkansas Trip - Part 3

Tuesday night of our trip we squeezed in some time to visit with Aunt Deb and Cousin Emily. They live in Mountain Home and had to work most of the time we were there. Since they live only minutes from the hospice we headed over to their house after we spent a really good 3 hours or so with Grandma in the afternoon. Because we were in such different surroundings and had spent all day at the hospice neither kid had napped. While Big Boy was fine, Boopy fell asleep the minute she was put in the car and the sun went down when we left the hospice. Mind you it was already after 6:oo pm MST and had been raining all day with not so fun thunder and lightning storms that really made Guya jump out of her skin. Needless to say, we made it to Aunt Deb, Uncle Mike and Emily's house where we stayed for about an hour. Boopy slept on their couch the entire time. Big Boy on the other hand made himself right at home, eating an apple and playing with their dog, Scout.

Big Boy & Emily

Emily & Aunt Deb

One problem with road trips and not wanting to bother with the kids inflatable beds each night is that you find yourself having to sleep in between these two crazy sleepers! You're welcome to try it the next time any of you come to visit!

We started our journey home Wednesday morning after a brief stop to say goodbye to Grandma. While it wasn't easy, knowing that this would be the last time we saw her alive, we were so grateful to have made the trip out and be able to spend such quality time with her.

As an effort to make this an educational trip, we tried to introduce the kids to all the wildlife. In Arizona we saw the dinosaurs, New Mexico brought cows, including one dead on the interstate nowhere near a cow pasture, in Oklahoma we saw a dead chicken on the road (I suppose he was trying to cross the street - HaHa - I crack myself up!) and in Arkansas we had the pleasure of meeting an armadillo. And while I should be embarrassed to tell you that we purposefully turned around to get a picture of it, Big Boy did have to go to the bathroom, so a stop on the side of the road for his potty stop was warranted. The armadillo was just a bonus! :)

Cool sky picture that Big Boy took from the back seat.

Ahh..the excitement of calling 911. While taking the only real nap during the trip, Guya had some excitement. She was driving along in Oklahoma and on the opposite side of the interstate she saw these small fires sporadically burning with no one around. At the third fire she woke me up. I snapped the quick picture below. We could actually see the flames. Since it didn't appear to be a "controlled" fire, I pulled out my phone and called 911. There were apparently other "do-gooders" out there that had also called already. Someone had been driving along heading east, pulling over and randomly starting fires. Not cool at all. Guya got to thinking that yes, she had seen a car pull away from the first fire she noticed but initially didn't think much of it. We're glad we tried to help and hopefully they were able to put them out before they caused major damage. It certainly added some excitement to our trip!

Random cute kids pics - they really rode along so well.

Ah..the fun of road trips includes the ever changing scenery. Most of Texas and New Mexico I didn't bother taking pictures. Although the pan handle of Texas is very clean and nice in appearance, there just wasn't much in the way of fun picture scenery. Although Wednesday night as we neared the New Mexico border, somewhere west of Wildorado, Texas there is a strange large number of red lights to the north of interstate 40. They all flash on and off at the same time and look to stretch at least a mile. The real bizarre part is that we haven't found anything to explain what these are for. There is no town nearby and they are randomly placed where it doesn't make sense to be an airport of some kind. Who knows, there are some weird people out there - for all we know it could be some lonely farmer trying to communicate with aliens. They do tend to have a lot of those circular farming fields out there that look strange from the sky - not something we're real used to out in the central valley of California.

Aside from the strange lights, we've decided we really didn't like New Mexico and wanted out of there as fast as we could. Especially given the fact that we nearly hit a couple of deer leaping across the road both in front and in back of us! Then later on, we had a coyote sprint in front of us nearly at midnight as we approached Albuquerque.

Arizona brought us some scenery changes worth photographing. The first one is the snow capped mountain as we neared Flagstaff. Quite strange really going from hot desert to pine trees and snow in a matter of minutes. I'm not sure the northern part of Arizona knows what kind of state it wants to be. But then I guess I could say the same for the extreme differences within California.

You can't consider it a good road trip unless you've seen some petrified wood. Exciting! Even more exiting is the abandoned school bus at the edge of the ledge.

One of the joys of being an older sister is convincing your younger sister to do very silly stuff. We, okay me, didn't properly pay attention to "Madge" our GPS and ended up directing us WAY off the interstate heading towards the Grand Canyon to get gas, fearing that there wouldn't be many more gas stops before we'd run out. We did find this "lovely" gas station that according to Guya could have been the muse for many horror movies. They did have this great statue though that I just couldn't resist not having a picture of! What a great sister to pose for me!

The picture below is the western end of Arizona, getting near the Hoover Dam and entry to Nevada. A happy sight nearing the end of a long journey.

That is until we get to this....major stopped traffic waiting to cross the Hoover Dam. It took us nearly an hour to get through this. Of course traffic heading the opposite direction was nonexistent.

So what do you do to entertain yourself and two little ones while stuck in traffic? You start with playing with the automatic window controls....up....down...up...down....oh! maybe trying it with my foot might be fun.

Then you play with the camera and setting sun.

Not thrilled with the limited angles and the uncooperative subjects, you try something new. Ahhhh! Let's see who can make the silliest face!

Here's Big Boy's try....he got bored after this one and went back to watching a movie.

Here are a couple of Boopy's tries.

Guya did some really great ones, but I know she'd kill me if I posted them, although I just had to post this one.

To be fair, here's one of my crazy faces. Not too creative but crazy. I think I look a bit like a donkey. Not sure why, I just do.

Soon after crossing the Dam we saw the beautiful sunset off in the horizon as we headed in to Las Vegas to Guya's house for the night.

Friday morning, we had a nice breakfast and then caravaned with Guya and Uncle D home to Fresno. They were coming back with us for Guya to help host a bridal shower for a good friend of hers and for Uncle D to get some kid time and just hang out. We got home close to 7 in the evening and were so glad to be done. Although, Saturday brought two showers for me, the bridal shower and a baby shower to attend, then dyeing Easter eggs in preparation for Easter the next day, which is yet another post all to itself.