This was an unexpected stop basically caused by poor planning on my part. Our original itinerary had us stopping in Missoula. However, I hadn’t bothered to make reservations anywhere figuring that Montana was a pretty big open place.  Apparently, that doesn’t apply to its motels….

As we hit one filled up place after another, we kept driving – all the time getting closer to Yellowstone and lowering the chances of actually finding anything. About 3 am we gave up and pulled into a rest area. Trust me, there’s nothing restful about 5 people trying to sleep in a Honda Civic!  Thank goodness for the local senior center. They showed up at 6 am with free coffee, donuts and juice – all much needed to recover from our rest.  By the time we were semi-conscious it was 8 and – amazingly – the Museum of the Rockies actually opens at 8 am.

It was a nice bit of serendipity. Steve tells me he found it to be one of the best science centers we’ve been to in terms of actually explaining the science and not trying to “Disney-fy” the content.

Outstanding dinosaur display! And, they had a travelling exhibit of King Tut artifact reproductions. Basically, that was reproductions of all the artifacts that are never allowed to leave Egypt. Again, very nicely done.

At the end of a long tired series of battles, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce declared,

Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired.

My heart is sad and sick.

From where the sun now stands

I will fight no more forever.

I found the Nez Perce displays both informative and infinitely sad.  Outside of that, it was a unique National Park. While we toured the portions in Idaho along the Louis and Clark trail, the park includes 38 sites in 4 states. It’s also unusual in that its dedicated not to a natural (geological) feature but to a natural (indigenous) people.

What can you say about the country’s most famous volcano? Oh yeah, did you know that it’s currently erupting? 

It is. Slowly and not nearly as explosively as it did in 1980, but there’s been an eruption going on for about 2 years now.  You can also still see the devastation from the 1980 blast -- mountaintops filled with what look like matchsticks but are really denuded tree trunks toppled over 20 years ago.

This was a nice stop and a good follow-up to Crater Lake which is really a lake filled into a caldera from a volcano. We like volcanoes!

Hands down, Crater Lake was the most beautiful of the parks that we visited on this trip, or any other trip that I can remember.  

Astoundingly blue, quiet, and peaceful.

We took the boat tour of the lake and survived the hike to and from it.  (If that sounds dramatic, the park service rates the hike back from the boat ramp as equivalent to climbing 63 consecutive flights of stairs! Add in the heat and it was quite an accomplishment!)

While there we learned that Crater Lake is the clearest lake in the world, mostly because it’s fed only by falling rain (very little) and mostly melting snow. Even though we were there in late July, there was still snow visible along the rim.

San Francisco was an awesome town, but very tiring. Of course, that may have been because we walked up the steepest street and down the crookedest! (I pointed out to Steve that all the other tourists were DRIVING those streets, not walking!)

We also crossed the Golden Gate bridge and gawked at Alcatraz.  The kids were entranced. Nina immediately observed that the tech people for the movie X3 weren’t being very realist since the Golden Gate bridge CLEARLY wouldn’t stretch out to Alcatraz as Magneto does with it in the series finale.  (Nice to see practical applications of our geography lessons…. J) 

We also took a side trip to Telegraph Hill to look for wild parrots. We found a few, 8 or so, but not as many as we’d hoped for. A new law against feeding them had gone into affect just a few days before and they seemed to catch on very quickly. Smart birds! I bet THEY wouldn’t have walked up the steepest street…..

After a cross-country trip and a couple of weeks on the road, what does the travel weary family do? Why, take part in a 6 mile fun walk, of course!

Actually, this was a pretty cool way to spend a nice Sunday morning. The walk was blissfully free of hills (that’s the Pittsburgh background in me talking!) and the weather was great.

All along the route, local bands come out to serenade the walkers. The selection was incredibly eclectic – soft rock, hard rock, classical (in tie and tails), and what I believe has to be the only all girl ukulele band I’ve ever seen!

While it was hardly record time, we did complete the walk and had a great time chatting with our friends along the way.

Our next step in CA took us to the doorstep of some very dear friends we’d not seen for quite a while. Our friendship goes back to our days in Sydney before any of our children were born, so it’s been a long and rewarding trip.

It was a great visit, although all of the kids were un-naturally quiet the first day as the last Harry Potter book had just been released!

Paul and Edna seemed just as I left them on our last visit nearly 8 years ago. The kids, on the other hand, all seem to have grown up overnight!

It was a great visit. We’re hoping they have a chance to stop in our way sometime soon.

After Sequoia we visited Carmel. One of Steve’s play buddies and his wife (Stuart and Marie) graciously hosted us in an absolutely stunning home in Carmel.

The house had gorgeous windows with phenomenal views, plus our hosts were just great fun to talk to.  Play researchers really understand having a good time!

From there we drove along the coast and had some great views of coastal redwoods plus some truly stunning coast!

For our first visit, Sequoia was an early camping trip with the kids for us. Nina (who just graduated high school) was just an infant and Tabi barely a toddler. In our hall, we have a great photo of tiny-tiny them beside this humongous tree. We’ll have to add a photo of slightly larger Nina with Kayla and Nathan besides the same humongous tree.

One thing we did this time that was beyond our stroller-bound selves the last time was to climb Moro Rock. Stunning views but very, very high up. I also loved all the warnings about lightning strikes.  (“If your hair feels slightly static, run like the wind to the parking lot. Do NOT, repeat NOT, hold onto the all metal guide rails!)  The view was worth the hike though….

FYI – Wondering why we didn’t take a photo in the big tree standing upright that you drive through?  Couldn’t find it J. It turns out that tree was in Yosemite, not Sequoia, and it fell down in 1969. Go figure!

After Legoland, we spent a day relaxing at Mary Lou and Tom’s. Mary Lou joined us for a  trip to see the 5^th Harry Potter movie. We saw the 4^th one with her as we returned from Australia so it seems to have become a habit. I’m not sure that we’ll make it to CA for the 6^th film so perhaps they’ll be up for visiting the East Coast.

As long as we were at the beach we went ahead and walked down to play in the actual sand and surf. Personally, I find this side of the Pacific much too cold.  But Nathan loved it!

Nathan was in 7^th heaven for the day.

He rode and played and built and built and built.

We all loved Mini Land. It was like a toy version of our vacation. (Look guys – There’s the French Quarter in New Orleans.  Look, there’s DC. Etc.) Also a nice reminder of vacations past.

In addition to riding pretty much EVERY ride and building with virtually every Lego system (legos, bionicles, etc.), the kids also did a Mind Storm workshop where they got to program their little robots to save tiny Lego astronauts in various types of peril.

Needless to say, we opened and closed the park. Great day!

And huge they were!

Since we’ve got this thing about hiking in deserts, we did so but took a pass on the camping since it was a 6.9 mile hike in (and out). We do have our limits J

Along the walk, Mom learned that it is really NOT a good idea to pet the cactus. Even the parts that don’t appear to have prickles are covered with tiny, sharp little hairs that it takes hundreds of miles to pull out of your palm….

While most of our cross-country stops were planned out (at least in general), this one was completely random. We were driving along and happened to hit a “brown sign” that looked interesting.

White Sands is the world’s largest gypsum sand field. [The gypsum origin is why the sand is so bright white. Most sand is quartz which gives it a beige “sandy” color.]

Being in the desert in the midst of a massive heat wave, naturally we stopped for a hike. 

The kids felt that between the temps – over 105 o and the sinking into sand effect, that they should get double phys ed. credits for this one!

It’s amazing that a town could turn a 50 year old conspiracy theory into this much of a tourist attraction.

We found Roswell to be hysterically funny, but not necessarily on purpose. The International UFO Museum and Research Center was a hoot. It was a combination of props left over from B-grade movies about the Roswell incident and pseudoscientific “proofs” that had the glued poster board appearance of a kids’ science project.  (They also might have been a bit more convincing without the blowup aliens overlooking the presentations!) Everything in town seems to have some sort of alien tie-in. There’s the Alien Bar and Grill, the Cover-up Café –the bridal shop even has alien bride and groom mannequins in the window.

If you get to Roswell, we would highly recommend the Bottomless Lakes State Park campground, very nearby. The lake had a great swimming area and stunning sunsets, and the campground had warm showers, tables under canopies to beat the heat and the weather, and the best price we saw cross-country at $10 a night. 

We didn’t get enough bats in Austin, so……

The evening bat flight at Carlsbad was awesome. Like the swarms in Hitchcock’s film The Birds, except it went on for nearly 45 minutes. There are about 400,000 bats, give or take.  No photos allowed (to avoid disturbing the bats) and the crowd really maintained almost a hush as the bats rushed out.

Serious smell though – before this was a national park it was a commercial guano mining operation. We did the self-guided tour in the morning. I’d recommend bringing a hankie if you do that because you really need to hold onto the rail at several points and ICK doesn’t begin to address that J

Hands down, this had to be the most one-sided historical presentation we’ve ever seen. Even the kids were questioning how the Mexicans might have viewed this by the time they were done.  That’s now on our list of things to look up once the school year kicks into full gear.

Outside of the slanted historical perspective, this was really surprising because it’s really, really small. Much smaller than I expected! Also, smack dab in the middle of San Antonio. I guess the city must have grown up around it.

While we were visiting Brian, Melanie & Josh in Austin, we took a quick trip to see the Congress Avenue Bridge. It’s best known as the Austin Bat Bridge because about a million bats roost there in the spring and summer. It’s the destination of choice in the spring for pregnant Mexican free-tailed bats.

While there were certainly a lot of bats, they were very difficult to see because flying black bats kind of blend into the really dark sky there. To see them, you really had to look at one of the white buildings in the background, then the bats showed up in contrast.

On this stop, we learned that not only do the bats live on mosquitoes, but they seem to wait until the tourists have attracted a ton of skeeters for them before they emerge for the evening. It was an interesting, but very itchy trip!

Well, we’re a bit late for the wedding J but we did eventually get out to visit nephew Brian, his wife Melanie, and their son Josh.

It was great seeing Brian again and finally meeting Melanie. She was incredibly sweet and very welcoming. We arrived in the late afternoon to a lovely Tex-Mex dinner of fajitas. (Following up the Teas BBQ from cousins Rick and Rosemary in Houston, we really felt like we’d done Texas traditional cuisine properly!)

And, of course, Josh was absolutely adorable!

What a cool museum, although a tad on the crowded side.  

We got some great tips on what to see first from cousin Rick before we headed out, which was great because he used to work at NASA.

The kids were most interested in the Space Station details and really enjoyed the presentation about life on the Space Station.

 Steve was most intrigued by the Saturn 5 rocket and the historical details on the Apollo program.

In Texas, we had the great opportunity to stay with relatives who showed us a LOT about southern hospitality. Cousins Rosemary and Rick were just fantastic hosts and we had a wonderful time.

The kids got the chance to attend a real Texas BBQ and Steve was in awe of Rick’s smoker – it actually held two full size beef  briskets, a tray of jalapeño poppers, AND a turkey. Incredible!

The kids found the pool table irresistible….. And we all enjoyed the chance to catch up with relatives, many of whom we hadn’t seen since a family wedding nearly a decade ago.

 It was especially nice being able to catch up with Rosemary and Rick. We’re still in awe of their vacation photos and videos. They take some pretty awesome vacations!