days 16-19: driving east, boulder, driving east, home!

We packed up our Wyoming apartment Thursday morning and hit the road — with, of course, a stop at Persephone Bakery for an iced coffee.

When planning the trip, we decided to break up the return drive with a day in Boulder, Colorado. It was about 9 hours from Jackson Hole, so we drove all day Thursday, with a stop at a pretty roadside picnic area for lunch.

 

 

David had booked us a suite for two nights in Boulder. We’d spend Friday exploring the town, then set out first thing Saturday for the 24-hour drive home.

Our Boulder hotel was the nicest place of the trip – a Homewood Suites, which we are now huge fans of. So spacious! And clean! And we had air-conditioning for the first time since before Yellowstone.

We had a lovely tradition on this trip of reading a morning Psalm together and then prayer. We all took turns reading it, even Noah.

 

 

We originally planned a small hike in the Flatirons outside Boulder, but, like I said, no one was much interested in hiking by this point. So we adjusted our plans for an hour at Scott Carpenter playground, tubing in the creek, ice cream on Pearl Street, and dinner at a brewery.

 

 

 

But it got hot. Really hot. And really fast. The creek was too low for tubing or wading. The splash pad at the Pearl Street Mall was closed. And we were all exhausted. Plus, Amie had gotten bitten by something our last night in Wyoming (a spider maybe?), and her face swelled from her forehead down through her nose. Poor thing, she was loopy on Benadryl and Zyrtec, and has declined to let me post a picture of the phenomenon. Thankfully she’s all better now.

So we just looked at one another and asked, “Should we cut our Boulder stay short and just hit the road?” David talked to our hotel and they kindly let us cancel our second night without penalty. And so, at noon, we checked out of the wonderful Homewood Suites, loaded up in the van, and started driving.

We’re sorry, Boulder. It’s us, not you.

 

 

The last couple nights and days are even now a blur. We ate cold breakfast sandwiches from the Homewood Suites for dinner at a rest area, and stayed in two really crummy hotels, one in Topeka, Kansas, and one outside of Asheville (we came so, so close to making it home Saturday night).

Those last days driving home are always the part of a road trip where everyone’s thinking, “I am never doing this again.” We were stiff and sore from sitting in the van for hours and hours. We were tired of being in close quarters with each other. Our stomachs hurt from eating not-great food for two and a half weeks. And oh, how we longed for our own beds.

But we did it.

We did it on Cheaper By the Dozen on audiobook, handfuls of Goldfish crackers, Starbucks canned nitro brew from the gas station, early Jim Gaffigan comedy albums, our Indie road trip playlist, chatting over Skype with Gabe and Noah’s birth mom, and just sitting and staring out the windows at the flat brown plains of the midwest, dreaming of the lush, green east coast.

When we pulled off 1-26 onto Greystone Boulevard on Sunday at lunchtime, Noah spoke for us all when he exclaimed, “Columbia! You’re my home!”

It’s good to be back.