– Carlsbad, New Mexico to Denton, Texas –
Well, this is it. We’re finally home. Everyone is pretty sick today, and there’s not much that’s interesting to see between Carlsbad and Denton that we haven’t seen before, so today wasn’t a very eventful day. In fact, Mark and I only took 7 pictures for the day, and two of them are of Mark blowing his nose. Forgive me if I chose to post a Grand Canyon picture from the other day instead.
Dad was feeling a bit better today, which was good, considering the rest of us were much worse off. He did all of the driving. Mark felt a little bad about it, I think, but we were too miserable to protest too much. I did a lot of reading today, despite the fact that I felt like my ears were stuffed with cotton and my voice was coming from the other side of the car. It was good to pass the time. It made us feel a little better, at any rate.
We started our morning at 5am, and we were all showered and packed up by 5:45. Breakfast wasn’t supposed to start until 6:30, so we had resigned ourselves to purchasing breakfast somewhere along the road rather than enjoying our free La Quinta breakfast. Luckily for us, a group of men who’d been out working on oil wells all night came into the hotel just after 5, begging for breakfast, so the staff made it a little early. That meant we got our breakfast before we left as well.
It was so cold this morning that we didn’t want to leave the dogs out in the car while we ate. It was around 12ºF. Dogs aren’t allowed in the breakfast area, so we kept them in the lobby at the little tables there, and took turns watching the dogs while the others got their breakfasts. Ripley enjoyed it immensely, since I gave her a little piece of my apple.
Our lunch stop was a Subway in Graham. We only had Subway twice this trip, which isn’t too bad. We’ve had it way more frequently on some of our other trips. We made it to Denton by about 3:30, and since our Xterra was still in Gainesville, Ripley and I stayed home to do laundry and Mom and Dad took Mark up to Gainesville to fetch the car. I also washed our little princess. She was a smelly girl after a week and a half in foreign locales, and she even had a flea. I killed it with her shampoo. Here’s to hoping it didn’t have any friends.
In a survey of the family, we’ve concluded that while Death Valley was pretty awesome, the Grand Canyon in the snow was the best part of the trip. It’s not something that we will see all of the time, or maybe ever again. I know I loved it, even with the low visibility.
Still, as much as I enjoyed the trip, it’s nice to be home. 2017 has several planned trips ahead, with one to Hawaii, for sure. It will be much easier to pack for that. It’s funny how much less room summer clothes take up in a bag.
– Trip Total : 3,753 miles –
