ROAD TRIP TO ARIZONA: DAYS TWO AND THREE

One look at the weather channel on Thursday morning reconfirmed that we had made the right call about leaving early. According to the weather map, we had missed the really bad weather by only about one-half inch (on the television screen anyway). And reading your comments from Thursday, it sounds like we missed snow, hail, sleet, and various other weather dangers that Tom and I are much too fragile to drive through.

We were on the road by 7:30 a.m. on Thursday and drove through the rest of Nebraska and into Colorado. After the miles and miles of the flatness of Nebraska, there’s nothing better than to see those Rocky Mountains coming up over the western horizon. The book-on-CD of the day was A Thousand Splendid Suns, written by Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner. It’s amazing how many bad things can happen to good people, just because they happen to live in Afghanistan. My advice: just say “no” if the Taliban offers to take over your local government.

We arrived in Denver by 3 p.m. and by following a complicated set of directions (take I-70 to I-25 and drive 0.3 miles left and 0.1 miles right and turn onto this little road going west and that little road going right and type in the secret code to the gated community), we arrived at Tom’s sister’s home in Littleton, Colorado (on the southwest side of Denver).

We had a great time visiting—we arrived early enough to go hiking in the Red Rocks Amphitheater area. It felt terrific to go for a hike after sitting in the car for two days. After a dinner of grilled salmon, asparagus, and pumpkin praline pie (thereby undoing all the good done by the hiking), we hit the hay.

Today, Friday, we traveled about 700 miles, from Denver to Colorado Springs to Pueblo in Colorado to Santa Fe to Albuquerque in New Mexico and finally our stop for the night, the Comfort Inn in Holbrook, Arizona. We passed through some very dramatic scenery—mountain passes, deserts, national forests. The temperature was up to 63 degrees in New Mexico—hurray! Our CD book for the day was a Tony Hillerman mystery entitled The Sinister Pig. By a strange coincidence, the book takes place in the Gallup area of New Mexico that we were driving through—eerie!

Tomorrow morning, we will arrive in Phoenix. I hope Colbie is as excited to see us as we are to see her. I’ll have a lot to tell her about the trip!