Um, sorry about not posting last night. We were a little tired and I just couldn’t pull together any decent thought patterns to type. I think we were all asleep by 10:30PM which was good since we needed to get up early today. And I need to be somewhat awake to type coherently, for an example of what a sleepy me sounds like, just read Day 3 of this trip. Glorified point form for the most part with incoherent ramblings and some “Screw Flanders” inserted.
Both kids just fell asleep now (it’s 10PM) after finishing Spiderman. We’ve had quite a lot of fun the last two nights watching it together; the first time on that movie for all three of us. I think Jared was asleep within 2 minutes of putting his head down, Chelsey wasn’t far behind either! Man, they are pretty cool for lasting on how tired they are. Thankfully there are only 2 days left until they can get back on their normal schedule.
So what happened on Day 4? Well, for those who didn’t read my angry post on Facebook, here’s a quick synopsis.
We slept in (wow! 8:45!) because we were planning a short drive from Abilene, TX to Lubbock, TX to end up at a little amusement park. One problem, we woke up to a downpoiur of rain. We hadn’t seen rain for weeks, and I guess Texas hadn’t either so of course it had to rain on that day. We set out anyways because Lubbock was a few hours away, hoping that the rain would stop or that it wouldn’t be raining in Lubbock. It can happen in Alberta that it is raining in Calgary and not in Edmonton (or Airdrie for that matter) so we figured we had a shot.
But no luck. We got to Lubbock and it was still ugly. But we drove down to the amusement park in an act of faith/ defiance that we hoped would pay off. Nope. The sign on the gate said it all “Park closed due to weather”.
(I just took a big bite of a Meat Lovers pizza from Pizza Hut. Oh man, did I miss good pizza)
Chelsey and Jared took the park being closed rather well. That’s probably because I had prepared them for this by telling them “if this park is closed, we can drive up to Amarillo because there is another park up there!”
So we drove to Amarillo.
And found that the park there was closed due to weather as well. Have these people never seen rain and wind before? Man, we were all a little disappointed (angry would work here too.) But what can you do besides go to the hotel and swim in the pool? Which is what we did and remarkably seemed to make both kids feel a tonne better.
We decided we couldn’t be too upset about all the rain. For a few reasons.
1. The lady at our hotel in the morning said that Texas needed all the rain it could get. I took this to mean they hadn’t gotten any for a while.
2. A sign on a building as we were coming into Amarillo stated “Pray for Rain”. Um, I suspect again that Texas needed the rain
3. The baseball game in Arlington and the PGA golf event in San Antonio were cancelled that day. OK, I get it. This apparently was a big storm and was welcomed by all except the three Diks who wanted to play.
So that brings us to Day 5 of this little trip. We’re about 3000 km’s in so far and from what we could figure we have driven 43 hours to this point. The odometer on my van is getting painfully close to 100000 KM’s, but I think we’ll make it home without crossing that line.
We woke up early this morning because we wanted to get out of Amarillo and get to Denver to hit their zoo. It was kind of funny trying to drag Chelsey and Jared (especially Chelsey) out of bed. Chelsey was basically moving the speed of cold molasses. But we got out at a decent time.
Ad we ended up in Denver right before 2pm and hit the zoo. (I removed 7 hours of VERY uneventful driving through Northern Texas, New Mexico and South Colorado.)
Oh wait, we were in God’s city of Colorado Springs this morning AND WE DIDN’T GO TO CHURCH. In fact, we did the exact opposite: we went to McDonalds! And to get there I drove through a red light (accidentally). And what is it in Colorado Springs, do you not want people to get off the Interstate and infect your precious little utopia of WASPiness? Would it hurt you to post some signs pointing me to restaurants like EVERY OTHER CITY ON THE INTERSTATE? Something is weird in Colorado Springs. Not Steven King weird, but definitely John Gresham weird.
The Denver Zoo was ok. Honestly, I expected more. They had some cool animals the Calgary Zoo doesn’t have anymore (polar bears, seals/ sea lions and rhinos) which we all enjoyed. But the penguins were nowhere to be found. You know I get it. The penguins like cold weather. Then perhaps they should have an exhibit where IT IS COLD so they aren’t put away at the first sign of heat?
There were also all kinds of empty exhibits. I guess it is because they rotate the animals to different pens to keep them interested, but what a pain for guests.
“Hmmm, what is in this exhibit? Nothing. Again. Moving on to the next empty cage.”
Another interesting thing was the amount of red hair floating around the place. One of the families at MTS were from Colorado Springs (oh boy, that city is lucky I have friends from there because that is the only redeeming thing I can find for it right now) and the dad and all of their 28 kids (well, it might have been 4) had bright red hair. I thought it was just their family, but now I think it is something in Colorado. It could be the water, or possibly something much more sinister. Even the clerk at our hotel had bright red hair.
We might be hitting Steven King level of strangeness in this state. I’m glad we’re leaving tomorrow. I might end up with red hair, even though hair would be nice again in my rapidly balding state. Although, is it better to be bald and not have red hair? Tough choice but I think I will stick with bald, thank you very much.
It’ll be nice to get to a couple of states tomorrow where the people are normal and don’t all share the same genetic characteristics: Wyoming and Montana.
Oh, crap.
~RD