The journey across the country was amazing and mind bending. I drove part of the way to California. I had never been in a car for that long or driven that far before.

We left at 4 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday and drove until we thought we were going to pass out. We stopped at a trucker hotel on I-10, about 2 hours out on the big highway. I'm glad we did I wanted to be awake when left Texas. I stared out the window at the state I had always lived in and said goodbye to the scenery for hours as we drove. I fell in love with the windmill farms on the way out of the state. They were so strange, like giant alien plants taking root in my backyard. The sun was setting as we drove past them all and framed the windmills in a purple glow. How was I to know one the most beautiful and alien things I had seen would be on the way out? I need to find some here in my new state so I can go stare at them for hours and contemplate how very, very small I am and how magnificent us humans are for making something so grand.

I cried silently to myself when we finally arrived in el Paso. I knew it was the turning point. I knew that if I made it out of Texas and didn't turn back, that I could make the rest of the trip. I should have done this years ago. I feel so brave after just a 2 day car trip.

I'm sad I missed most of Arizona. I drove almost all the way through, but mostly at night. The SO couldn't drive through the state because he has a VERY old ticket there and a failure to appear warrant. He got the ticket on his last trip driving through almost 10 years ago and none of us wanted to take the chance of him being hauled off the jail.

The worst part of the entire trip was actually coming into California. We stopped in a tiny town in Arizona, right near the border, to let the dogs walk and switch drivers. The city was Quartzville and it was weird....An entire town of mobile homes. As we started climbing the hills and head into California, it started to rain. This was the worst rain shower so far this year. It poured on us all the way to Los Angeles. The SO always visits the ocean when coming to California, before doing anything else. So, we drove down Santa Monica to PHC (in a tiny Mazda and a 26 foot UHaul) and found all the beach entrances closed. All of us were disappointed, so we decided to go find a place to stop and sleep. We went all the way to Torrance before we found a hotel that had a parking lot we could park the truck in.