Day 2 and 3

Well, days 2 and 3 didn't quite go according to the master binder. Day 2 started with a friendly chat with a member of the Colorado state patrol. He didn't give me a ticket but he did Ask me to 'control' my excessive speed. I WANTED to tell him I was controlling it quite well, but thought I should just leave it at that.

We enjoyed driving through the valleys and canyons in Utah, and especially enjoyed when the speed limit was 80!









We had a quick 15 minutes in Arizona and it was beautiful, but by the time I was able to peel up the death grip I had on the steering wheel it was gone. Those downhill winding roads can be quite scary!

We got to Las Vegas just after lunch time and once we got settled we took William to the m&m's store. He had fun making his own bag of m&m's but from there it felt like we proceeded to make promise after promise which we couldn't live up to. We told him we would go see the gorillas at the rainforest cafe, but they were closed Monday and Tuesday for renovations. We told him we could take a picture with the yellow m&m but it was gone. Then we told him we would eat at the motorcycle restaurant but he fell asleep!!! We did have fun on the strip though and he loved the fountains at the bellagio!









That night in our hotel room William told us 3 times in a row that he heard Melvin beeping but we ignored him. Two hours later Austin was taking stuff out to Melvin to pack a little and he found two windows smashed! Nothing was stolen thankfully (my guess: a druggie needed $ for his next fix and decided Thomas trains weren't worth much on the black market) but we had a fun few hours Tuesday night and Wednesday trying to reconfigure our plan.

Staying later Wednesday morning to get melvin fixed did allow us to go back to rainforest cafe, but would you believe the gorillas were still blocked off?!? What are the odds? I told austin it was a good thing we weren't in Vegas to gamble because we were striking out left and right.

By the time we finished with lunch, packed up the cars and got gas we didn't leave Vegas until almost 2:30. We had a long boring road ahead of us and I had hoped to get started sooner but that's ok.

The drive was less than spectacular most of the way. Guess California is only pretty on the western side.




Around 10 pm we exited off i5 in California to head into Monterey and I was nearly asleep. But - the rain and roads winding around the cliffs sure woke me up! I was pretty sure I'd find myself off one of them but luckily at 11:30 we rolled into the best western.

William woke up when Austin got him out of his carseat so I was mortified at the thought of being awake one more minute. But one he saw the bed in our room he leaned out of Austin's arms onto the bed and curled into a ball on the pillows. He didn't budge for 8 hours :)

Our travels had ended and our heads hit the pillows, ready to FINALLY start life in California!


- manda