The Drive to Utah

Jon and I had originally planned to have two weeks to get to his family reunion and back. But when we got in clinical trials, we switched a vacation week so that we wouldn't have to use FMLA for one of the St Louis visits. So that meant one week for the trip out. We decided to try driving through the night. Around 1am, I took about a one hour nap while Jon drove. Then we kept each other awake for the a few hours. Around 4am, I drove while Jon napped for an hour. At 6am, we switched back and I napped for about 30 min. I woke up to Jon pulling into a gas station....that was closed. And, a sign had read that it was the last gas station for 20 miles. And, we had just hit empty. I love I-80. So, we decided to wait for the gas station to open. Jon napped while the kids and I just sat there. They were actually really good. I let them out of their seats and we just sort of hung out. We were in shorts and it was about 50 degrees outside, so way too cold to get out. Around 8am, we decided the gas station wasn't going to open. We said a prayer and decided we needed to keep going and we would make it to the next gas station. It was a great teaching moment because we explained everything to the kids and told them that we were going to need Heavenly Father to help us get to the next gas station. He did and we made it safe. We also made sure to say a prayer to thank Him for getting us there. Back on the road, things were going well again. Until we noticed that they car was getting really loud. Or had it always been this loud? I climbed in the back to try to fix the shaking windows when our back tire blew. We pulled over, put on a spare, drove 25 miles on the spare to a tire shop and bought all new tires. An hour and a half later, we were back on the road. We pulled up to Bradys at 3pm. We made the trip in 24 hours on the dot. Even with our rather lengthy setbacks. The last hour was probably the hardest. I started to get delirious and really needed to sleep. I kept falling asleep but didn't want to fall asleep because I didn't want Jon to fall asleep so I would doze and jerk myself awake and make sure he was still awake. I think I was driving him crazy :)

Lucky me, I got to share foot space with Rocky the whole way.

This was coming down Parleys Canyon. I drove this canyon many times and I can't remember ever seeing it so green.