The End

From Colorado we went straight south, and then straight west. It took a while for me to think that New Mexico and Arizona were beautiful. Part of it was just me being ready for our trip to be over and seeing the same thing. Part of it was also the fact that we were driving through the desert. I had to laugh. My kids did a project on different regions of our country this year and one group did the desert. The way they decorated their landscape was just not what I thought of as desert, but I’d never really been to a desert. Being in the area, I had to admit that what they put on their project was exactly what I was looking at. The red rock is really quite pretty, just completely different than what I expected it to be like.

Driving through that region was also hard because there were many more hills and mountains than I anticipated. Coming out of Denver we could have gone across the mountains through Utah. We didn’t think those steep grades would be a good idea with our car though so we missed out on some great areas of the country. We thought that going south we would miss the mountainous areas. That wasn’t exactly how it worked though. It was actually worse than Colorado in certain areas. There were times when we were only driving about 25 mph going uphill. It definitely took us longer but it all worked out in the end. There were definitely times of frustration while climbing when we just had to keep positive attitudes and not push the car harder than we already were.

Upon crossing the California state line you have to stop. It’s like crossing the border in from Mexico sort of. We were asked if we had any food and the guy checked our trailer and let us go. I’m very glad Joffrey warned us about that ahead of time. Then we paid for our first tank of gas and realized we were officially in California!