Utah or Bust!

We made it! The drive to Utah was an amazing experience. It was beautiful, fun, hard, tiring, impressive, delicious, never-ending and a trip that I will always remember. What a joy it was to sit in the cab of a 26-foot Penske truck and talk to my husband for four days without anyone else or anything else to interrupt. I sat sideways in the truck against the passenger door with an ice-pack on my swollen knee and my feet on Dean's side of the cab which he lovingly would rub from time to time as we drove the 1,985 miles from Pensacola to Delta. I passed the time by reading some more of "Anna Karennina" and crocheting dish cloths. I made 5 in all and reached page 200 in the book about Anna which is a feat considering the depth of the book. There are 400 more pages to go and you cannot read this one fast. We stayed overnight in Longview Texas, Amarillo Texas and in New Mexico (the name of the town escapes me now). We drove approximately 500 miles each day in a truck that felt every dip and bump in the road. At times we would bounch off the seats and giggle and then wonder if our "stuff" would make it home intact.

Getting in and out of the truck was kind of an ordeal for me because of my stupid knee. Each time we stopped Dean would get a step ladder out of the back and set it up so I could climb down and up with less difficulty and without putting extra strain on my already strained knee. I wore the same black stretchy black pants for 4 days because they were "oh my batman, so comfortable!" On the fourth day Dean very quietly said, "Are you going to wear those pants today?" After some questioning as to why his question, he said, "I'm just kind of tired of looking at them from behind every time you climb the ladder to get in the truck!" Hahahaha! What a laugh I had! I haven't worn the pants since but in the future, when I want to remind him of how beautiful I really CAN be, I might put them on again and model for him. I might even put a note on them from behind that says, "I'm wearing your favorite pants again!"

The drive was lovely and along the way I took pictures of my favorite scenes and places. I will post them later when I have time to sit at my own computer (I'm at mom's at the moment) .
I have pictures from the I-10 Pensacola Water Tower to the Louisianna Bayous to the Texas rest stops which I hate to say were probably the most impressive parts of Texas we saw on this trip and then the beautiful indian country of New Mexico. Shiprock, New Mexico was amazing to me with the wild and random rock formations that would just out of the desert with nothing else around them for miles and miles. I had decided that NM was by far the most beautiful state we drove into Utah. As we drove into Utah the first beautiful thing we saw was one of the new LDS Temples that was built in the last few years. It looked alot like the Orlando LDS or Birmingham Alabama Temples. The view of that temple made me feel at home and at peace immediately. We parked outside it for a few minutes on Sunday afternoon and took a breather before heading on again.

Canyonlands National Momuments was next and the scenery was unlike anything I had ever seen or remembered seeing in my lifetime. There was "Hole in the Rock" Momument and the beautiful red-rock arches in the desert that popped up around each bend in the road and we would just look up and say, "Wow!" My camera was snapping as fast as it could snap and occasionally we would drive out on a "look-out" to a scene that would open up a 360 degree theatre in the round panoramic view of untouched red rock beauty. I had seen all this as a child but truly did not remember the beauty and scope of Utah until we crossed the border from Colorado to Utah this past Sunday.

On this the last day of our journey, we stopped in Moab Utah to eat dinner. Now we realized that we were only 3 hours from finishing our trip and our stop in Moab was partly to replenish our hunger and also to make our trip together in our moving truck last a little longer. This day we found that Moab was not the same Moab we had driven through 20 years ago on our way TO Florida. Moab has become a tourist mecca rather than the hot little quiet desert town it once was. We determined on this day to take a long weekend sometime soon and go back there. Moab is where all the old Western Movies with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood were filmed. The new improved Moab has beautiful shops and restaurants and most of the people on the street look like they are transplants from New York or Europe. They have come to experience the high desert in this town that now has award winning restaurants which have moved from Atlanta and the East Coast because Moab is now a money-making beautiful place that people pay big bucks to come and visit. We ate at a chinese resturant that was voted Atlanta's Best Chinese restaurant in 2003. Oh my it was good. It was not too expensive but they served everything in a fancy way like you would see in Atlanta or New York.

Upon Arriving in Delta, we took one day to rest, and on Tuesday we unloaded the truck into our little "love shack" as Dean refers to it. The next day we took the truck back to Penske in Spanish Fork Utah. Our little house is full of boxes because when men start to unload they just do it. It was my plan to stop them at the door with each box and tell them "where to put it" but they were not patient with that at all. So . . . when my knee gets fixed, I will walk back into that house and we'll move most of the boxes out to storage before we start to unpack so we can actually live there. Will this ever come to an end? Yes it will but not before a little more struggle I guess. I was a bit frustrated but as is the case in many situations, women have lists and men just want to get it done and go home. This was a case where the men won out.

I miss my friends in Pensacola. I think about them every day. I miss Clay in Pensacola and think about him all the time. I know he is where he needs to be at this time and he'll join us when the time is right. My Relief Society President in Delta has already come to see me. She said she woke up on Monday wondering, "I wonder if Katie has made it here yet!" Many people in Delta have known I was coming and they welcomed me warmly. We had anice visit and then she was on her way. It's so nice to belong to this world-wide community of women because no matter where you go, they are just like you and you have an immediate community of friends. I already love Jeanne Anderson and think that she will be one of my closest friends in Delta Utah.

Pictures to follow - - sometime soon! Land of the Mountains High - - Utah I Love Thee!