We are literally only an hour from home and should be there by Friday early afternoon. It has been raining, raining and raining and so because of weather and missing home more than we would have believed have decided to end the trip a week early.
A couple of funny things, while at Theodore Roosevelt at the first part of the trip we walked for hours to find a prairie dog village, got chased by buffalo while riding our tandem. That was the highlight of our trip as far as creature encounters except when we got to Colorado. The funny thing is prairie dogs make their homes in all kinds of weird places in Colorado but they especially like the parking lots of big conglomerates like Wall Mart so it was funny to see them eating clover and grass and guarding their villages among the shoppers (and yes, we did stop a couple of times because Wall Mart is every where and while we often couldn't find a grocery there was always a Wall Mart down the road.) We saw ravens in every state and we called to them as our brothers and sisters, thinking they might be following us from one state to the next. But seeing them sit with buzzards on the same fence was something else. Pat learned at Arches that they are so smart they know the routine of the garbage trucks and will wait and follow them. They talk you know.
The tandem was the best fun and so the campgrounds we liked best had bike trails as well as hiking trails.
Thanks to all who gave us books to read. Advise play like your children would, fly kites, collect rocks and shells, build your own hoodoos. And if you are going to succumb to fast food, Popeyes has the best spicy fried chicken. Tim's Restaurant at Lake Anna, Virginia has even better catfish and hushpuppies than anyplace we ate and National Forests and Army Corps of Engineers the best, cheapest campgrounds except the free small lake campgrounds we stayed at in Kansas. Forget avoiding tornadoes you can't no matter how well you try to plan your trip. Autumns are going to be warmer with climate change so we are gong to get bad weather, can't be helped so plan to be hot and wet.
We decided 2-3months will be as long as we are gone ever again. We miss the colors of home and even though we didn't fight, it will be nice to have another bedroom to go to when Pat is snoring away and I think Eliza, the cat will be the most happiest to be home, where she can roam the house and her backyard. We missed our friends at the Fellowship and Hobbs Farm especially summer's bounty of fresh LI vegetables. We didn't see as many farm markets and farmstands as we had hoped.
Pat drove 9600 miles and I drove 100 miles. We have been through 25 states and stayed in 22 for at least 1 day. You can bet he is TIRED. Any time the road was wide enough for me to drive, it was also so windy my hands were not strong enough to hold this dinosaur on the road. I hope to drive some on the Southern/Florida trip this winter.
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