The End of Vacation

After much too little time with the Fords, it was time for the Gordons to get home. While we weren't particularly happy about the 2 and a half day car trip we were about to make, it was fun to head home a different way than usual and through some states we had never been in. We decided to stop at the Petrified Forest on our way out of Arizona, and it was well worth it, BLAZING HOT, but well worth it. Here is the fam in front of The Painted Desert, much more beautiful in real life...

The Petrified Forest really has a lot to see, along with the Forest and the Painted Desert there are ruins from some ancient people that lived there, um, anciently.
Spencer really enjoyed the petroglyphs, especially this one of the giant bird carrying a poor helpless man away. Or is it a stork delivering a new baby? I guess I'll leave that interpretation up to you...


If you look carefully you can see some of the petrified wood, like the log sitting right on top of the ridge...
Here is a log we saw by the side of the road, totally petrified. They have some beautiful colors in them.

And back in the car again. Here is Albequerque, we were a little sad that we didn't get to see it during the day, but it did give Spencer an opportunity to get creative with the camera, I think I have about 50 nighttime pictures from our drive home...
The next day brought Texas and the leaning water tower (right up there with the leaning Tower of Pisa). About the most exciting thing we saw there...
And Missouri... at night...

The next day brought St. Louis and the feeling that we were going to make it, only six more hours to go! See the Arch?
At this point we were pretty unwilling to get out of the car anymore, so we pointed out the window and said, "Hey kids, there's the Arch!" And they feigned excitement.

More creative photography to help pass the time. Notice the kind of glazed over appearance to his eye? I think he was becoming resigned to a life lived in his car seat forevermore.

One interesting thing about our drive home: I picked up a biography of Abraham Lincoln that I read during our trip. On the way home from Arizona, Steve became so bored of driving that he asked me to read my book aloud to him. It was an amazing book and I highly recommend it. The wild thing was that as we neared Springfield, Illinois (home of the amazing Abraham Lincoln museum and his tomb) we were also nearing the end of the book. Seeing as we had never actually been inside the tomb, we thought we would stop real quick on our way home and visit it. Here we were driving toward Springfield, reading about Lincoln's assassination after having read about his amazing life. The timing was crazy, Steve pulled off the freeway into Springfield just as we were reading the last few lines of the book talking about Lincoln's body being brought home at last to Springfield. That book gave me a much greater appreciation of what Lincoln went through as President during such an extremely volatile time in our history.


And more driving...

While I was going a little nutty...
Steve seemed to be perfectly sane...
Well, maybe not entirely sane...
And, finally, after a round trip of approximately 4100 miles, the site we we so anxious to see...
HOME!